Case Studies

Vendor and Inventory Management

Client has an online shopping portal with the world’s biggest selection of books. It carries over 1.5 million titles. In order to sell the 1.5 million titles, client has created various "online storefronts" on websites such as Amazon.com, Ebay.com and Abebooks.com. These websites have an enormous client base which allows smaller, reputable businesses exposure to more buyers and gain overall exposure in the online shopping segment.

• Being a prominent player in online books industry, the major focus of the client is to provide a good service, as well as a large diverse pool of books to choose from.
• First, a good service entails the responsibilities like effective vendor management and an effective customer support. Second, maintaining a large and diverse pool of books entails effective inventory management.
• The client wanted these two to be taken care with utmost priority. The requirement was to have the inventory of all major vendors (publisher, wholesalers, remainders etc) listed on the client’s websites.
• Also, once the orders had been placed by customers and sent to the respective vendors, they were required to be followed up with the vendors to keep the turn around time small.

Q3 Technology provided effective solutions to all the above mentioned business requirements of the client. We take care of the inventory files coming into our system, process those as per the required format and then upload those on the desired sites.

In addition, we keep a check on the pricing of ISBNs, duplicate ISBNs etc. Since old Inventory listings on the client sites gives rise to cancellations and thereby putting customers to inconvenience, therefore Q3 analyzes the created reports on old inventory and then follows up with the vendors for their latest inventory files.

The vendor management also includes checking and updating inventory status through the SQL interface, updating or deleting listings from partner sites etc. The performance monitoring of vendors also forms a part of vendor management activities being taken care at Q3 technologies.

Oracle reports are created for analyzing the cancellations ratio, fulfillment ratio, and delivery time etc for each of the vendors. If a vendor is found to be contributing to negative feedbacks for the client, then that vendor is put on hold and issues are followed up.

As the entire business chain on the client is based on orders and their timely delivery, pending orders need to be followed-up regularly with the vendors. As vendors inform us with the status of orders we update our system by using the SQL interface; thereby keeping the system and the customers updated about their order status.

• Monitoring process is continuous due to different time zones.
• Cost effective solution tailor-made for client’s requirement.
• Oracle reports and procedures are created to streamline the entire process.
• 24X7 monitoring of vendor accounts and performance.
• Effective follow-up results in better ratings for the client that in turn leads to better business for the client.
• All inventory processing is done in India while it is night time in the US, this results in more free server resources during day time in US and hence increasing the performance of the overall system and web pages.
• Complete ownership of the process and innovative techniques to achieve optimum results.