How homenature saved 90% of its order management costs
About homenature
For over 25 years, homenature has defined luxury furniture in New York. Founded by individuals with a strong background in fashion and design, the company's vision is to become a national brand that creates sophisticated environments reflective of the natural world's beauty and tranquillity. Despite their enduring success, homenature’s custom order workflow was hindered by escalating operational complexities. With a business model that relies on customizing almost all furniture purchases the company required a solution that could handle detailed product customizations, streamline the handoff from sales to production, and maintain a seamless flow of information from work orders to purchase orders.
They needed a solution capable of:
Capturing detailed product customizations, including fabric choices, specific dimensions, and wood finishes.
Streamlining the handoff from sales to production to ensure a smooth and accurate transition of custom order specifications.
Automating the conversion of work orders into purchase orders, critically preserving all custom details throughout the process.
Assigning the correct vendor or supplier to each purchase order, automatically matching based on the product or its configuration.
Eliminating manual processes and reducing errors across all departments improves overall operational efficiency and accuracy.
The Challenge
Constrained Growth Due to Manual Labour
Despite their success, homenature's custom order workflow was hindered by growing operational complexities. Their prior system, STORIS, created significant bottlenecks and inefficiencies, prompting them to seek a more effective and affordable alternative.
Incompatible Systems
homenature's vision for seamless luxury experiences was hindered by a solution that was unable to integrate with their Shopify store, requiring the upkeep of two separate inventory databases. As a result, homenature's team was consistently spending over 40 hours weekly manually reconsolidating orders and stock. This lengthy process also led to a high volume of manual and costly errors, causing friction for clients and internal teams.
"My priority when choosing a new solution was to find an all-in-one system. Before WorkMate, we manually managed two inventory databases: one for Shopify and another for our furniture order management system."
Robert Morrison
Senior Consultant
Additionally, high levels of customization resulted in a multitude of vendors and suppliers. Without integrated data, homenature often needed to spend more time updating prices and specifications to reflect any changes.
Stagnant Staff Adoption
The previous solution's steep learning curve and complex user interface made it difficult for staff to navigate. Teams would have designated members who could input orders, which would quickly develop longer lead times and bottlenecks.
STORIS also lacked a lot of automation that homenature needed to scale efficiently. With manual order management and purchase orders, the brand struggled to ensure that each item effectively met customer needs.
Lengthy Project Completion
homenature faced high levels of customer error as their sales teams would manually input orders back into Shopify. Capturing specific product customizations, such as fabric choices or dimensions, was particularly problematic, resulting in disjointed handoffs between sales and production.
In some cases, crucial details for intricate custom orders were lost or incorrectly transferred between departments. With projects and lead times dragging on, customers were left frustrated and impatient.
Not sure where this came from, more simply, we didn’t take any custom orders on the web only in store in person.
The WorkMate Solution
A Unified and Automated Workflow
By leveraging WorkMate, homenature's team manages end-to-end work orders and purchase orders directly with Shopify's inventory management. No longer are they shackled by two databases and manual management.
How homenature saw success with WorkMate:
25% reduction in total order management time
90% reduction in order management costs compared to their previous solution
50% more efficient in order processing
Seamless Shopify Integration
"WorkMate removes the second database, allowing us to leverage Shopify as a single source of truth," shares Morrison. "The beautiful thing is we can now create custom products directly in WorkMate. If we're out of stock, we can create a purchase order within the app, taking less time than checking two different inventories."
WorkMate seamless integrates into Shopify Admin & POS, centralizing all orders, product data, and customer information into one place. homenature drastically reduced errors and inconsistencies while improving visibility with real-time insights into sales, inventory, and supplier interactions, enabling more informed decision-making. With improved efficiency through streamlined workflows across all departments, homenature saw faster order processing and fulfillment.
Streamlined Orders & Supplier Management
homenature leaned heavily into WorkMate's ability to automatically map items to the correct supplier. The platform instantly converts a work order into a purchase order, preserving all custom details without any manual re-entry. This automated process, combined with the migration of suppliers and the creation of custom presets, has streamlined operations and made it easier for the Homenature team to handle special orders and white-labeled products, saving countless hours of administrative work.
"Before, making a price change would be an ordeal. We work with numerous vendors, and price changes are not uncommon," explains Morrison. "By having integrated data, we spend less time monkeying around, and now a price change can either be uploaded to WorkMate or edited directly in the app."
Custom fields built into WorkMate have allowed the brand to template their sales orders and collect all the information they need to quickly process requests.
"Default fields for orders in WorkMate have been great. Depending on the client or supplier, it automatically provides us with the correct fields. We frequently utilize the built-in templates. Plus, adding additional details or custom requirements to the order is easy."
Robert Morrison
Senior Consultant
Improved Ease of Use Across the Organization
WorkMate makes it easy to customize products by fabrics, colours, and other materials, expediting sales handoff and minimizing errors all the way to vendors. The solution is easy to pick up, and non-tech-savvy users can easily adopt the system, lowering the reliance on specific team members to be experts.
"Not everyone on our team is tech savvy, but what's great is that WorkMate doesn't require a brain surgeon to operate. This solution is more straightforward to use than our previous setup. While we're just getting started with WorkMate, we're already very comfortable, even from the moment we turned it on."
Robert Morrison
Senior Consultant
A Foundation for Future Growth
"Workmate's advanced workflows are beneficial because they enable similar information to be passed across the organization in a single ticket, eliminating the need to enter it multiple times, especially for inventory."
Robert Morrison
Senior Consultant
The implementation of WorkMate has not only addressed Homenature's immediate challenges but has also positioned the company for future growth by providing a flexible and scalable platform that can adapt to its evolving business needs. Homenature has successfully transitioned from a manual, error-prone workflow to a unified, automated, and scalable system. This has allowed the company to focus on its core mission of creating luxury environments for its clients, with a strong foundation built for continued success.