JIA Home’s Speed-to-Market Investments Continue to Pay Off
Change is never easy, but sometimes you just have to take the plunge.
That was the experience of Los Angeles-based home decor company JIA Home when it updated its antiquated system of tracking products through Excel spreadsheets. A few years post-investment,
JIA Home has cut the length of its sales cycle, helping to more than double annual sales, Alex Ernenputsch, JIA Home VP of sales, tells CGT.
The company partnered with Surefront prior to the pandemic to leverage its Unified Product Collaboration platform as part of a search to improve its product development lifecycle. Previously, emails between JIA Home’s product development team and the factories they worked with were used to build 10-20 different spreadsheets for the sales team to share with buyers at major retailers.
When the orders were finalized, the data would be transferred from the sheet to JIA Home’s SAP system to produce a purchase order to send back to the factories. This process involved a lot of time-consuming copy and pasting.
“We knew there had to be a better way,” says Ernenputsch.
Indeed, the now-streamlined process means every step from item creation to order processing is done digitally — no paperwork.
The transition was well timed given that less than a year later, COVID-19 lockdowns forced JIA Home’s employees to work from home. The investment made it easier to collaborate with both the internal team and their factory partners, meaning the move to remote work didn’t cause any business disruptions.
Access to real-time data and workflow visibility has enabled JIA Home to quickly identify potential problems and take proactive measures to address them, communicating with suppliers in chat messages that are logged alongside the product, quote or orders being discussed. This organization is better than using Slack or Microsoft Teams when working with third-party logistics providers, says Ernenputsch.
The new process has reduced JIA Home’s product development process from days or weeks to hours. It also ensures data integrity by removing the potential for errors caused by transferring data through emails and Excel spreadsheets.
By getting their products in front of customers more quickly, JIA has cut the length of the sales cycle, freeing them to move onto the next project, per Ernenputsch, and they’re now able to react and adapt to industry shifts much more quickly.
“The importance of having an ever-growing online product catalog that is accessible from anywhere in the world at any time can not be understated,” he notes.
