Everbest optimises operations and performance through the adoption of end-to-end retail solutions – bringing an end to inventory woes.
Established in 1979, Everbest is a homegrown Singaporean brand that is synonymous with quality and comfort. It currently operates five local boutiques and has numerous partners in various departmental stores offering shoes and handbags. It also has a sister brand Tracce, which is targeted at women in their early 20s who are inspired by the latest catwalk trends.
Over the years Everbest has continually evolved to constantly deliver timeless collections of high quality, comfortable footwear and accessories for both ladies and men. With a strong team spearheaded by its founding directors, Everbest has steadily grown into an international brand, with numerous points of presence all across Asia.
The core philosophy for Everbest is to design simple and value-for-money shoes without compromising quality. And in order to satisfy the demands of its customers, the company has gradually broadened its product range over the years. While Everbest started out only manufacturing women’s footwear, its current product range has extended to men’s footwear and handbags as well as small leather goods.
Applying that very same philosophy to its work processes, Everbest sought to re-engineer its work processes to help its older workers across its various boutiques in Singapore. The company partnered with NTUC’s Employment and Employability Institute (e2i) through the WorkPro Job Redesign scheme to procure an end-to-end retail solution that is more equipped to meet the needs of today’s challenging retail landscape.
Based on a thorough assessment of the challenges in its current internal processes, Everbest realised it needed to implement a fully integrated retail solution that streamlines both its sales and inventory processes. The selected solution should provide up-to-date data consolidation and real-time inventory movement and tracking. Manual work and repetitive tasks should be automated to save time and provide true data accuracy through the elimination of human error.
Before embarking on the project, Everbest’s workers had to manually reconcile sales and inventory data as these vital retail operative cogs were not integrated in its work processes. When sales and inventory are run in isolation, the inventory level of each product would need to be manually reduced to capture items that have been sold or increased if stock has been transferred in from another boutique. This is a tedious and painstaking process which the workers had to commit to each day for the five boutique stores and 16 consignment stores in Singapore.
Everbest aims to ensure that there is optimal product availability at all times across all its retail points of presence, but it is also this very commitment that is driving a high volume of stock movements across these locations. Without a proper system to support primary processes like syncing stock transfers and consolidation of stock balance, the Everbest team had to carry out these tasks manually which was not only unproductive, but also highly prone to human error, especially with time constraints.
Through the support of e2i, the company invested in a proper retail point-of-sale solution, which comes complete with a real-time backend inventory module that is able to help streamline the inventory movements across its various locations. By relying on the system to record sales transactions, the resultant data in the system allows for the generation of reports related to both sales and inventory.
Everbest’s workers can now refer to the system to check on real-time stock availability across all locations as the inventory levels are synchronised across the board. With the new solution, workers no longer need to call each store to cross-check on stock availability as they can simply access this information quickly and easily through the back-end inventory module.
As a result of the efficiency improvements, Everbest has committed to salary increments for its five older workers, making it a win-win for both the company and its employees. With the strong foundation provided by the new integrated retail solution, Everbest can now take on any future expansion plans with greater confidence.
