Flowgear, Africa’s cloud-based integration platform provider, lets Jeffrey Stein Sales provide retail customers with rapid, up-to-date information on pricing and availability, and process orders quickly in Sage Evolution.

Leading toys and hobby products supplier Jeffrey Stein Sales was looking for a solution to provide better and faster information on stock pricing and availability to its customers, especially South Africa’s major online retailers. In a highly competitive market getting up-to-date information to customers is critical. The company turned to the Flowgear integration platform to enable it to serve its customers with accurate information more quickly.

Jeffrey Stein Sales are a Sage Evolution customer, and when they were looking for a solution, Sage recommended they investigate Flowgear. According to systems manager, Clint du Plessis, their challenges were:

1. providing inventory data to their online retailer customers in real time, and to regular retail customers via their website,
2. capturing supplier invoices, which can have many line items,
3. processing customer purchase orders.

Using Flowgear’s cloud-based integration solution, Jeffrey Stein now have an automated integration from Sage Evolution to their online retailers. Inventory data is sent to these retailers every day and presented in the format they requested.

The Flowgear platform goes further and processes invoices from international suppliers, and automatically generates corresponding sales orders in Evolution. “Some of the invoices can have as many as 500 line items, so automating that integration has been great,” said Du Plessis. “We are also using Flowgear to automate the creation of invoices from customer purchase orders.”

“Automating our integrations with the Flowgear platform saves us hundreds of hours of work, as much a few months a year in man hours,” commented du Plessis. “As well as saving time, there is greater accuracy, and staff can now focus their time and efforts on customer service rather than data capturing, and deal with customer queries regarding availability and prices.”