The search for greater efficiency

The mobile app has emerged as a vital timesaving and streamlining tool designed to help small to medium-size businesses in their daily transactions, and give them an edge with their users and competitors.

‘‘Mobile apps can give an SME the opportunity to reduce costs, errors, manual processing time and data entry and provide better customer experience to keep them competitive in tomorrow’s market,’’ says Paul Truscott from enCloud, a boutique digital agency in Sydney.

‘‘In the B2B space in Australia, major players like Amazon are using their economies of scale and technologies to squeeze the often already very slim margins for SME businesses.

‘‘The trick to competing in this environment is to find more efficient ways of doing business.’’

At enCloud, the company’s skilled development team aims to provide a suite of digital services for clients including responsive web sites, powerful e-commerce portals and practical user-friendly mobile apps.

‘‘A big part of what we do at enCloud is help customers define their objectives, ideal business processes, identify opportunities for increased efficiencies and build new streamlined solutions to improve their quality of service and reduce the cost of fulfilment,’’ says Truscott.

Globally, mobile devices have overtaken desktop as the main way people access the internet, with users on average spending an estimated 3.3 hours a day on their smartphones or tablets, using apps as their go-to tools for communication.

Backing their own expertise in the app building business, enCloud principal Vamsee Chittajallu has leveraged the IP gained from enCloud’s B2B development to launch a new SaaS app platform, called OrderTron, aimed at the food and beverage supply industry.

‘‘OrderTron is a B2B order management and payments solution for wholesale suppliers of food services like butchers, greengrocers, seafood, poultry, bakers, coffee and beverages suppliers,’’ says Truscott.

‘‘The industry is very time poor and has very thin margins – any reduction in labour costs and order errors is a huge win. Most of these orders are for next-day delivery so they have a very small window to capture, process, pack and ship the orders.

‘‘By reducing the data entry alone we are saving customers hours a day in processing.

‘‘The built-in payment module also greatly assists in their cash flows, which is a real issue in this industry.’’

With a wide range of suppliers, from major fruit and vegetable distributors to gourmet ice-cream and designer vodka wholesalers already using OrderTron, the OrderTron’s team has devised the platform to work for businesses on a number of levels.

OrderTron accelerates the ordering process with rapid capture, compiling and auto-generation of packing slips and invoices.

The app creates orders and worksheets, eliminating the possibility of errors by removing the need for ‘‘old school’’ voicemail, fax or email orders. Real-time cumulative product reports allow wholesalers to accurately manage purchasing and stock control.

OrderTron also seeks to increase efficiencies, giving users the time to process more orders a day and allowing their customer base to grow, while free web-to-app messaging aims to help increase sales by providing customers with real-time special offers and product updates.

Along with online help, OrderTron offers free demonstration accounts trials and user training. For readers who mention this article, they offer free set-up of products and customers on the OrderTron system.

‘OrderTron is ... for wholesale suppliers of food services like butchers, greengrocers, seafood, poultry, bakers, coffee and beverages.’

Paul Truscott