Element packaging, filling in the gaps worldwide.

Element Packaging, led by Adam Petyt, manufactures and distributes biodegradable and compostable, environmentally friendly packaging products. They have a huge presence in the UK and European markets, and have recently expanded their business into a few Southeast Asian countries and the Caribbean. While the company's main footprint is in the B2B market currently, a good number of their orders are coming from the online retail market as well. Moving to a scalable solution like Zoho has helped the Element Packaging team grow substantially and efficiently over the last three years.

Boxed in by fragmented systems.

Initially, when the company was in the growing stage, it was quite easy for them to handle the shipments and stock details for their UK warehouse using Excel spreadsheets. As they started expanding their operations, they opted for QuickBooks for their accounting system. However, its lack of inventory and order management capabilities meant that they had to supplement it with stand-alone applications, connected with third-party connectors like Zapier. The data flow was not really seamless, though, and there were serious issues with their inventory management, such as gaps between their accounting and physical inventory. The Element team also found it quite difficult to accept online orders and feed them manually into their accounting system. Some other major issues that the team faced include tracking shipped packages and order handling. They needed to keep their customers updated with the shipment details, maintain warehouse-based stock updates, and provide live order statuses for the sales team, among other tasks.

Looking outside the box for the right solution.

Adam and his team discovered Zoho Inventory while looking for a scalable and easy-to-implement inventory management system. They signed up for a free trial and found that Zoho Inventory solves a lot of their issues with inventory management, warehousing, order management, online Shopify store integration, and shipment tracking. The Element field sales team is now using the Zoho Inventory mobile app to check for current stock availability and punch in their sales orders on the go. The Shopify integration helps them bring all the online sales transactions from their Shopify store in to Zoho Inventory, further increasing the communication between their website and inventory system. Shipments are now generated using the shipping integrations and manual shipping options in Zoho Inventory, and tracking information is available using the AfterShip tracking integration. The Zoho Analytics integration within Zoho Inventory helps the team create powerful BI reports based on the data from all of their integrated platforms.

The inventory system is now well integrated with Zoho Books for seamless handling of accounting data. This helps Element ensure that no orders are missed and that accounting is centralized for the company. Thanks to automation, they can now completely avoid manually entering accounting data as well.

Putting it all together.

Deploying Zoho Inventory in their organization has helped the accounts team stay well-informed about the inventory team's work and the orders that come in. Shopify orders from their online sales platform now flow into Zoho Inventory automatically, eliminating the need to feed in orders manually. With these new workflows, the warehouse management teams and front-end teams now collaborate seamlessly using the cloud-hosted mobile and web apps. Orders created by the sales team on the go via the mobile apps are now being immediately processed by the operations team, improving operational visibility and order turnaround time. Shipment tracking and automatic notifications have made customers happier, resulting in better engagement scores and an easier job for the customer success team. The gaps between the inventory and accounting systems have been resolved, and with payment status being updated in real time, there are no disparities there either.

The fabulous customer support that Element Packaging has received from the Zoho Inventory team encourages them to keep scaling higher. Adam and his team are now exploring Zoho CRM and many other apps in the Zoho portfolio and hoping to move further towards a unified business management experience for their company.