Toolware is NZ’s largest wholesale distributor of quality trade tools, operating for over 50 years. They are well recognized as leaders in the market with some of the best hand tool brands in the trade.
Toolware has a range of around 7,000 products which they supply to 2,000 retailers. With such a wide product range, updates, deletions and new product introductions are frequent. This means they need to be in constant communication with their customers to ensure they have the latest information and best range available.
Some months they will need to send new product information to their retail customers for as many as 2,000 products. Each customer has a different system or spreadsheet format they would like the product data fed into.
This leads to a lot of manual data entry and one person spending 1 -2 full days per week repetitively uploading data to customers.
Vesta: Saving Toolware Time
ITM and Buildlink, two of Toolware's customers, are now using Vesta to collect product information from their suppliers. Toolware was invited by these customers to use Vesta as a portal to transfer product information to them.
Using Vesta means that Toolware only needs to input the information once into the system and can supply to both retailers or as many as use the Vesta platform.
“Using (Vesta’s) bulk upload function is fantastic. It cuts down on time, it just makes it a lot easier for me.”
“With some other (systems I use) I can spend at least a day trying to upload or edit 20-30 products. With Vesta I can get a couple of thousand products done within a couple of hours’’ Sarah-Ann Nicholson, Toolware Sales Analyst
Reducing Errors and Preventing Customer Issues
An issue Toolware face is when one of their suppliers discontinue an item with short notice. If their customers order an item that is unavailable, this results in Toolware needing to call every branch for that customer to notify them that it is unavailable, which can be upwards of 50 branches.
With Vesta, they are able to push a notification instantly through to their customer, which once accepted, marks the product as unavailable and unable to be ordered in their system.
This makes communication of these changes quicker and easier and reduces errors and time-consuming problems from arising.
“The biggest downside of not being able to push information straight out to customers like we do with Vesta is that they are trying to buy products that either we don’t have or that are obsolete or that have had changes, unfortunately that means a lot more time for us… it’s a lot of time taken, to sort something that could easily be fixed with just a quick file upload ” Sarah-Ann Nicholson, Toolware Sales Analyst
Maximizing sales by getting new products to market faster
Once a product is listed with a customer, Toolware can rapidly get the new product information into Vesta, where it is immediately available for stores to start ordering.
“It does definitely help get new products out quicker to customers, once its ranged with the customer, if its already uploaded, they can start ordering it immediately” Sarah-Ann Nicholson, Toolware Sales Analyst
Making it easy to share product information with all of Toolware’s customers
At Vesta, we are working with Toolware to make sharing their product information easy for all of their customers, rather than just those currently using Vesta. We can do this through our ‘custom export function. With this tool, Sarah-Anne would be able to export the information from Vesta directly into the spreadsheet formats required by each of her customers. Saving the time currently spent re-entering the data manually into each sheet.
“In terms of other suppliers, I definitely think they should honestly make the move to Vesta, the systems are going to take them a lot less time than possibly what else they are using, it’s really intuitive (to use) I don’t expect anyone will have any trouble” Sarah-Ann Nicholson, Toolware Sales Analyst
