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Key
features & functionality
used by Animalmania: |
Running
web store
operations |
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Real-time integration |
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with back-end
accounting and business operations
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A-Z listing |
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| Accounting |
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General ledger |
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Accounts receivable |
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Accounts payable |
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| Sales |
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Sales order |
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Point of Sale |
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| Inventory
Control |
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Serial number tracking |
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Graph inventory levels |
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| Purchasing |
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Purchase orders |
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Generate/assign serial |
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numbers on
purchase orders |
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Drop shipping |
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| Management |
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Custom reports |
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Company
Background |
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A pet for every occasion
Whether you’re shopping for bird-eating
tarantulas, foot-long giant African
Millipedes, Texas striped scorpions,
live crickets by the thousand, or a
$3,000 python, you can get it all from
Animalmania. And in case you don’t
live near its Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
retail shop, you can shop for any of
these or hundreds of other items from
the convenience of your own home through
the company’s secure web store
and have a dozen live spotted newts
delivered right to your door.
Founded in 1992, Animalmania was the
world’s first online pet store.
The company operates its ten-person
retail, wholesale, services and online
business out of its retail storefront.
The business has expanded from a pet
retailer to become a wholesaler and
to offer on-site services such as aquarium
and pond design and maintenance. Animalmania
carries over 9,000 items in inventory
including cats and dogs, birds and reptiles,
fish and rodents, and all the food and
supplies needed to care for virtually
any pet. Animalmania runs on Everest.
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The
Challenge |
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As if it wasn’t challenging enough
to take care of thousands of creatures of
various fin, fur, and feather species, founder
and owner Mike Pata’s real challenge
was trying to run a growing business out of
three different software packages that interacted
about as well as a cat in a snake pit. “It
was a total nightmare,” Pata said. “Point-of-sale
had absolutely no input, our inventory management
system only tracked outputs, and we were about
to have a custom web store built that wouldn’t
interact with anything else.”
Pata found himself spending at least two hours
a day handling anomalies – unusual orders
that his staff wasn’t prepared to handle
since none of the systems were integrated.
Pata knew there had to be a better way. He
wanted a system that integrated inventory
management with accounting and a turnkey web
store that made it easier to do business online.
He finally hired a network integrator to custom
build his business applications, when one
of the network administrators suggested he
look at Everest ERP Software. |
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The
Solution |
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For about the same cost as what he would
have paid for his custom web store alone,
Pata implemented Everest in March 2001. Today,
Animalmania is more profitable than ever before.
“Everest gave us a lot more than what
we anticipated,” Pata said. “It
has made us do a lot better than we could
imagine.”
Now that all of the operations at Animalmania
are completely integrated, Pata is no longer
a bottleneck for order anomalies since all
of his employees can answer customers’
questions right out of Everest without having
to go to Pata for the same information.
With regard to managing inventory at Animalmania,
Pata is very pleased. “Everest has made
us much more efficient with inventory,”
he said. With the insightful reports available
in Everest and its ability to track inventory
levels in real time, Pata received an added
bonus after drilling into the ins-and-outs
of his business. “We found out that we
were paying for 1,000 goldfish a week, but
only selling 600. Using Everest, we were able
to identify that some of our suppliers were
skimping on our orders, and this went on for
eight years. We’ve put an end to that,
thanks to Everest.”
Perhaps the greatest benefit to Animalmania
of using Everest is its boost in profitability.
By running detailed reports on the profitability
of each animal by species, Animalmania was
able to focus on the more profitable animals
and scale back on the less profitable ones.
“We’re more profitable today than
we ever were because Everest gave us the ability
to look at information we couldn’t see
before, and to use that information to make
intelligent decisions about products, pricing,
and inventory,” Pata said. “This
wouldn’t be possible without Everest.”
The business has also moved the less profitable
and now unnecessary order processing positions
to highly profitable services positions. “We’ve
been able to reduce payroll by 12% while growing
sales and increasing customer service,”
Pata added.
Animalmania also runs much more efficiently
than it did before using Everest. They’ve
eliminated double payments and negotiated
better discounts with their suppliers, armed
with real-time sales and inventory data. The
company has been able to shrink the order
processing and handling time down by 90% since
all the order information is entered once
into Everest without any double order entry
required at any step of the way. Animalmania
even uses Everest to drop-ship live crickets
from its supplier, which saves time on order
fulfillment, reduces spoilage, and minimizes
inventories – all of which ultimately
reduce costs and increase customer service.
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The
Result |
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Doubled profitability in two years,
making the company more profitable than
it has been in its 13- |
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year history |
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Cut 90% of the order processing time
through Everest’s integration of
accounting, sales orders, |
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web orders, inventory, and fulfillment |
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Provided valuable insights into certain
deficiencies, such as double-invoicing
and supplier order |
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shortages |
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Enabled drop-shipping of live crickets
from its distributor |
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Enabled expansion of the business
into high profitability areas such as
custom services |
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Received a year one return
on investment of at least 285% with
a four-month payback period |
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Alleviated owner from
spending two hours daily troubleshooting
order anomalies |
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