Suma Gourmet General Trading LLC

When your business is all about expensive and perishable goods, the viability and liquidity of the whole enterprise depends on how good your warehouse inventory management is.

Although Suma Gourmet used a commercial solution up until 2018, warehouse inventory management remained a weak link in the company’s operations. There was no well-established workflow, there were issues with shelf life management and surpluses left unaccounted for. Moreover, cost calculations were manual and involved imminent human errors.

The company needed to switch to a modern automation system that would not only exclude errors, but also upscale the overall business efficiency.  

Before implementing its product, First BIT specialists thoroughly analyzed all customer processes and came up with an algorithm that allowed them to clearly identify root causes of problems.

Before switching to FirstBIT Accounting, Suma Gourmet’s workflow was as follows. After accepting goods from a supplier, workers would weigh them and sort in the warehouse. Surpluses, if any, would not be recorded and often just discarded. In addition, as sorting was done manually, products with different shelf lives were mixed with each other. When sending meat to a client, warehouse workers would pick what they thought was the most suitable item and ship it out. This disrupted the workflow of key departments. The management struggled to analyze and plan orders, and sales to understand which products to sell.

Following First BIT’s analysis, the company integrated the suppliers database with automatic invoice generation, restructured the warehouse itself and equipped it with smart balances and barcode readers. The management in turn obtained a convenient and simple tool to analyze a whole range of indicators for future work planning.

Here is how the process looks like after the First BIT solution was implemented:

• A Suma Gourmet employee creates a request right in the software and sends it to a supplier.
• After receiving and accepting the goods, the warehouse manager weighs each piece separately.
• The system calculates precise details for each piece — weight, cost, shelf life — and prints out an individual barcode sticker indicating its storage location.
• When a customer places an order, the system records relevant dates and locations, analyzes the goods available in stock, selects the most appropriate items, and puts the order in the line.
• All that warehouse workers now have to do is take the goods from corresponding warehouse cells and generate an invoice.
• If the shelf life of an unsold item expires, the system issues an alert to send it to a refrigerator.
• At the end of each day, the system structures all the data and creates management reports on gross profit, stock balances, and completed orders.

Together with the warehouse automation system, Suma Gourmet switched to FirstBIT Accounting’s Payroll module. In addition to the convenient user interface for managing all accountable expenses and payments, the solution easily handles value-added tax, which was introduced in the UAE in early 2018.

For field agents, the company has developed a mobile application that automates all sales operations. The centralized ecosystem now allows any Suma Gourmet to quickly create and close field orders.

The First BIT solution opens up new prospects for Suma Gourmet. Now it can, for example, enter the e-commerce market. The advanced and well-tuned warehouse inventory management system will allow the company to work not only with large clients, but also B2C customers — all processes are now automated.