Nobody trusts the screen
Sales ring the warehouse before they promise anything, because the count's been wrong since March. That phone call is your stock control system.
Eleven Twelve / 11/ERP ERP & stock systems
Your stock figure is a guess.
The system says twelve in stock. There's four on the shelf, six on a pallet nobody's booked in, and two went out Friday against a delivery note still sat in a van.
01 The problem
You're buying blind and counting twice
Purchasing runs on somebody's memory
You reorder when a gap appears on the racking, or when a customer asks for something you haven't had in six weeks. Then it's a panic order at a worse price with a courier charge on top.
MASTER FINAL v4 (USE THIS ONE)
The real numbers live in a spreadsheet on one laptop, kept by one person who can never take holiday at the same time as anyone else. That file is now load-bearing and everybody's frightened of it.
02 What you get
What you end up with
One stock number, live
Goods-in, picking, returns and adjustments all hit the same count the moment they happen. The trade counter can quote off the screen without ringing the warehouse to check first.
Reorder points that fire themselves
Set a minimum and a lead time per line, and the purchase order lands in your approvals before the shelf empties. You send it or you bin it. Either way you found out before the customer did.
Purchasing with the numbers attached
Every PO carries the cost, the promised date and which orders are waiting on it. When a supplier slips a week you know who's affected before they phone you about it.
Warehouse jobs that make sense
Pick lists in bin order instead of SKU order, and goods-in that ticks off the PO line by line so short deliveries get caught on the dock. Rolling counts too, so you're not shutting the place down for a Saturday stocktake nobody wants to do.
Numbers your accountant will take
Stock value and cost of sales come out in a shape that ties up, and invoices go into Sage without anyone re-keying them at half four on the last day of the month. VAT handled properly on the odd stuff as well.
03 Why it won't fall over
Why it won't fall over
The systems we sell are already running someone's business.
We sell what we have already built. We built the CRM and operations system Embello runs on: 50,000 plus products, over 100,000 customers, next day turnaround, production done in-house in Tamworth. We built the Lordwell Catering Equipment website, sat on 56,000 plus product lines with live UK stock and next working day delivery. We've counted stock at 7am on a Friday with the phone going and forty orders stacked up, so nobody has to explain to us why the Friday rush breaks things. Get it wrong and we're the ones the warehouse rings at 7am, which tends to concentrate the mind.
Maxwell Reeley · Eleven Twelve, Tamworth
04 How it happens
How the work goes
Stage 01
We come and watch
A day on your site. We follow one order from the phone call to the van, then stand on goods-in while a delivery lands. Most of what's broken shows itself in the first hour, and it's rarely the thing you told us about.
Stage 02
Sort the data out
Product file, bin locations, supplier costs and opening counts. Some of it's wrong, some of it's in three places, and one supplier sends a CSV with the price and cost columns swapped. This is the dull part and it decides whether the rest works.
Stage 03
Build it in slices
Stock and goods-in go live first, then purchasing, then the accounts feed. You keep the old way running alongside for a fortnight until your team stops double-checking, which is how you know it's right.
Stage 04
Hand it over
Your lad on goods-in gets ten minutes and a laminated card, not a training day. We fix whatever annoys people in the first month, hand you the documentation, and you've still got our numbers after that.
05 Questions
The stuff you're too polite to ask.
How long does one of these take and what does it cost?
Three to six months for the full lot, and stock and goods-in are normally running live inside the first six weeks. The price moves with how many moving parts you've got: one site with straightforward buying is a different job to four vans, a production bench and kitted assemblies.
Why not just buy an off-the-shelf ERP?
Often you should, and we'll tell you when. If you're one site, a few thousand lines and plain buy and sell, something like Unleashed or Cin7 or a proper Sage setup will do the job for a monthly fee and you'll be live by Christmas. We get called in when the standard product can't cope with how you price or how you kit things up, and everyone's ended up back in spreadsheets to get round it.
What happens to us if the person who built it disappears?
More than one of us knows your system, so nobody here is a single point of failure. The code, the database and the documentation live in your accounts, on ordinary boring technology any competent developer can pick up without a séance. The catch is we take a handful of builds at a time so you get people who know your business, so if we're full, you wait.
06 Start
Come and get a free walk-round.
Ring us, tell us what the screen says your stock is, then go and count it.