Flowgear, Africa’s cloud-based integration platform provider, has enabled Coricraft to integrate inventory data in SYSPRO with the system of an acquired company, and also between warehouses.

Leading South African furniture manufacturer and retailer, Coricraft, has experienced continuous growth in the 20 years since it started as a single store. After a recent acquisition the company determined it needed to streamline data integration between the acquired company’s system and the corporate SYSPRO ERP system. The acquired company generated 500-1000 new product codes per week, so a system to automate integration was investigated. According to Mark Gawronsky, Applications Manager of Coricraft “we looked at various options but none came close to Flowgear.”

The advantage of the Flowgear cloud integration platform was that Coricraft could initially start in one area without incurring high costs, and expand it later. “As our experience with Flowgear has grown we’re finding 101 more things we can do with it,” says Gawronsky.

Coricraft started by ensuring inventory between SYSPRO and the acquired company was kept in synch, and that stock movement between its multiple warehouses and stores was updated properly. With 70 warehouse and store locations, each with their own inventory, this used a laborious manual operation. But using Flowgear has enabled the company to reduce tasks that took hours manually down to minutes, and in some cases, from days to minutes. The company was able to save on hiring additional staff and to deploy existing staff to more valuable and useful tasks.

Using Flowgear, Coricraft has been able to improve efficiency of inventory-related activities and streamline operations between systems. Now that the initial business needs in the retail operations have been addressed, Coricraft will be looking at how integration between retail and manufacturing operations can be improved. “Flowgear has been proven over and over,” commented Gawronsky.