Proposal for Inventory Management and Point of Sale Systems (Public)

Table of Contents
Table of Contents Introduction Details of the Plan Example Situation Finding a Solution What are the requirements? Inventory Management One Solution Cost Other Requirements Narrowing Down a Solution Solutions Researched Proposed Solution Other features & thoughts: Pricing Summary

Introduction
As you read this proposal, please consider the women at Haitian Creations. The goal is to empower them with knowledge and to share the good news with these ladies: “My name is Joseph and I am 23 years old. I have 2 children who are 6 and 3 years old. I was living on the streets. Now, I am able to live in a home. I have worked at Haitian Creations for one year. This program allows me to pay for my children's education. I am very thankful for Heartline giving me the opportunity to learn and work. One day I would like to study and be a nurse.” - Joseph Wideleine “My name is Nehimie and I am 27 years old. It is difficult to find work and I am very excited to be able to learn and make purses. This is my first job and I have worked at Heartline for one year. I enjoy making purses and other products with my hands. One day I would like to be a clothing fashion designer.” - Nehimie Ulysse Can we help more women like this? These are women that are working hard to bring themselves out of the oppressed lifestyle they are all too familiar with from before. When I visit the program I see them studying, writing down notes, working long hours from sunrise to sunset. The heart of Heartline is that we want to be diligent in doing everything we can to support these women.

Details of the Plan
We support and help grow the program by marketing their creations to others in the U.S. We distribute their work to shops in Haiti, shops in the U.S., purse parties, and online. This isn’t anything new. We are doing this today. In fact, we are sending purses, beads, and tin out to more places than we ever have! There are more purse parties, more shops involved in selling, and more people buying through the women’s center and guest house than in the past. By God’s grace, Haitian Creations is growing. We are here to be advocates for these women and want to continue to support them. “As small businesses mature into medium-sized businesses, they often expand into multiple locations. This, plus more employees and more customer orders, makes the task of inventory management more complex.” (from Inventory System Software - L).

Example Situation
Let’s say we have a visitor, Jane. She comes to Haiti and sees Haitian Creations. She gets wicked excited to have a purse party back in the states. Jane takes a number of purses home. A few weeks later she throws a purse party and sells half of the purses. As instructed, she should send the purses back to Denver. However, maybe she hesitates after the party and thinks, “I can sell one to my mom. I will see her in two weeks and will keep them until then.” As you can imagine, life becomes busy with kids, work and other obligations. To no fault of her own, she forgets that she has extra purses sitting downstairs in the basement. Now add on more and more purse parties happening, and you start to have hundreds of bags at different locations in the country. It starts to become more and more work to track all these purses. It ends up being more time, more money, and more error prone. Inevitably and sadly purses get lost or unclaimed. The issue becomes that a woman here in Haiti has spent time - time away from family, time away from finding other work, sacrificed money to be in the program, etc. She now has a purse that is sitting in the basement of someone’s home not available for sale to be bought. We don’t want to point fingers at anyone for this fault. If we want to support these ladies as much as possible, we want to make sure we can answer the question fairly quickly of where is the purse that she made. Taking a step further... Let’s say that Jane sends the purses back to Denver. Denver now receives the purse and then through the process they send the purse out again for another purse party. These are just more touch points. The Haitian Creation people in Denver need to be able to track this purse being received. They need to tell Haitian Creations office in Haiti that they received the purse. They also need to track that they re-sent the purse to another purse party.

We are just following one purse, what if we had dozens, hundreds or thousands! Of course, God only knows the plans he has for the women’s center. We are not even talking about just purses. This includes necklaces, bracelets, purses, tin art, wood art, etc. The amount of inventory starts to add up very quickly! We not only want to be able to track all these things handcrafted pieces of art - we need to be able to track these creations.

Finding a Solution
The point is now clear that we need to be able to better track where our inventory has gone. Since we have multiple locations both in the United States and in Haiti the requirements for finding something to help us becomes more difficult. It is mostly because medium to large companies have a similar requirement and have lots of money to spend on such apps because they know how beneficial and necessary it is to their company.

What are the requirements?
There are a plethora of inventory solutions available. Inventory Management We need something to manage all this stuff! On the top of the list of requirements is the ability to manage what we have and that the solution could expand to fit our needs as we grow. One Solution The solution needs to fit the needs here in Haiti and also the needs of the staff in the United States. If at all possible we want to all be on one page. We don’t want the Denver location using some solution and the Haiti location using a completely different solution. We are still a small organization - we can find something that will fit us both. Ideally, the solution would need to work for the Haitian Creations Haiti gift shop & warehouse, the Heartline Guest House, the Denver warehouse, other retail locations, and finally the purse parties happening around the country. Cost With all the options available - we need to find something in a suitable and reasonable price range that fits the size of our organization. Other Requirements The search was narrowed by applying some of the following criteria:

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Accessible Everywhere (US / Haiti / etc) Central Real-time Inventory Management Multiple warehouses/locations ○ Easy to transfer inventory from one store to another Syncs with Quickbooks Point of Sales Capability iPad Integration for Inventory iPad Point of Sales Integration Ability to have barcode scanning (either external device or built-in with the iPad)

Narrowing Down a Solution
You could find something that costs thousands of dollars a year or find a free solution on the internet. In many ways it was difficult searching for a solution because with features and requirements of what we are looking for you start to find that medium to large business also look for the same features yet they are able to spend some major cash in order to receive them. We, of course, are a non-profit yet with requirements that spread across countries. An example of a high-end system would be Fishbowl solutions which is $1,997 for one user and $7,195 for five users. QuickBooks Enterprise has a solution for multiple warehouses which starts at $3,000 for 5 users. That’s not including the additional packages for barcode scanning. Those are fantastic solutions but they don’t fit into the requirement of reasonable price for our organization.

Solutions Researched
I researched hundreds of applications. Most of them I could throw out within a few minutes but there were some that need much more investigation, especially when it came to connecting with Quickbooks. invoiceASAP ○ Good solution for invoices and inventory ○ Sync’s with quickbooks (customers, invocies, etc) ○ No barcode scanning capability Invoice2go ○ Poor inventory tracking ○ Sync’s with quickbooks (ability to sync back and forth invoices on computer) ○ Barcode scanner (uses camera) Quick Sale

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Great point of sale abilities Doesn’t sync with quickbooks

qBooks ○ Sync perfectly with Quickbooks ○ Syncs inventory with Quickbooks ○ No multiple warehouse locations ○ No barcode scanner EmobilePOS ○ Great invoice creation ○ Poor inventory tracking ○ Syncs with Quickbooks ○ Barcode – need to buy external one $310 Erply ○ ○ ○ ○

Great inventory tracking Syncs with quickbooks back and forth Barcode scanner (uses camera) Possibly too expensive

Quickbooks with Mobile Connect ○ Great invoice and purchases through individual desktop software or mobile ○ Poor inventory tracking over multiple locations. ○ No inventory tracking ability on mobile connect ○ No barcode scanning ability with mobile connect It is difficult to add all the requirements to each solution above but hopefully it’s a quick overview of some of the other solutions out on the market.

Proposed Solution
My proposed solution is to use Erply. In my hunt for a solution that would fit everyone at Heartline, this one met all the requirements hands-down. The only thing that kept me from proposing it sooner was the high on-going price. I have since written to the company and mentioned to them what we were doing in Haiti and if there was a possibility they could offer us a discount. They have replied and reduced their price for us.

Erply is accessible from any location whether here in Haiti or the United States.

The iPad application even allows you to work offline without internet for a while and then syncs back up once online again. ● Accessible Everywhere (US / Haiti / etc)

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Central Real-time Inventory Management ○ We can consolidate all our systems to one inventory. ○ We wouldn’t need to send an excel spreadsheet back and forth - we would all have access to one real-time inventory. Multiple warehouses/locations ○ Easy to transferring inventory from one store to another. ○ It is built in so that we can transfer inventory from Haiti to Denver with it being very easy. ○ Easy to manage all the purse parties and other locations we send purses, beads, etc. Syncs with Quickbooks ○ Sends new invoices from Erply to QuickBooks ○ Synchronizes customers between Erply and QuickBooks ○ Sends invoice payments from QuickBooks to Erply Point of Sales Capability ○ iPad, Android, and Windows application with barcode scanning. Option credit card swipe device as well. iPad Integration for Inventory ○ You are able to login through the iPad and see customers, inventory, and everything that is accessible through the web. Ability to have barcode scanning ○ The Point of Sale application uses the built-in iPad camera.

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Other features & thoughts:
● HaitianCreations.com. This software can also integrate with e-commerce solutions such as Magento, Prestashop and Opencart. If someone buys online it can backed by Erply for inventory processing. This means that the website doesn’t have to have a different database of purses, necklaces and tin. The website can use what the rest of us are using. This also means inventory tracking would even be easier yet and reporting would be simpler. Support. They have a wide range of support which includes video tutorials, a searchable index of support articles and optional person-to-person support depending on the plan you pay for. Easy interface. The web page interface is especially easy to navigate and many of the features just make sense. This wasn’t true of all the different inventory choices available.

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Inventory Feature Hightlights: Below are some of the inventory features that come with Erply. The same information can be found our their website: http://www.erply.com/features/.

Stock Transfers
View stock levels across locations with ease; take it a step deeper with ERPLY sales forecasting tools. Transferring inventory from one store to another is just few clicks away.

Physical Stocktaking
Double check inventory levels in the system vs. physical in store. No physical software restricting you to the register! Walk around and count mobile using any tablet computer!

Price Lists
Multiple price lists can be associated with one Central inventory, giving you the freedom to offer different pricing based on location, and/or customer group. Price lists can also be assigned start/end date for promotional markdowns!

Sales Promotions
Freedom to create rules and implement your choice of Sales Promotions. From BOGO to % off next purchase, ERPLY gives you the freedom to create, run, and later view powerful reports on Promotions.

Coupons
Create, print, and scan to redeem coupons directly from ERPLY. Coupons can be created stand-alone, or in association with sales promotions. Later view reports to see how many coupons produced vs. how many redeemed! Let ERPLY give you ROI on your Promotion!

Multiple Tax Rate Support
Have locations/products with different tax rates? No problem! Tax rates can be set on the product or location level. Set and manage different tax rates for all of your store locations!

Location Specific Quick Tabs
Hot sellers may differ by store location, so why shouldn’t your quick buttons? ERPLY supports store specific quick-tabs.

Scalability
We make life easier for multi-store businesses! As your business is growing, ERPLY grows with you! Accessing customer records, pulling comparison reports between locations, making inventory transfers and adding new locations can be done instantly!

Purchasing/Receiving Feature Hightlights: Reorder & Restock Levels
Automate your ordering process by defining Reorder points & Restock levels for products. Later use these rules as recommendation or rule for ordering.

Purchase Order Creation
Create Purchase orders to be sent out to suppliers by email, or print out and send the hardcopy. Customize text, and add your logo for that professional feel!

Purchase Order Receiving

Track Purchase Order status to see what has arrived and what is in transit. Write off damaged goods, and track partial orders.

Stock Replenishment Report
One report to truly revolutionize the ordering process. One click of a button adds quantities based on restock level, one more click to generate Purchase Order documents to the multiple suppliers associated.

Purchasing Report
Clean report by Supplier and/or products ordered in given date range. View & print from anywhere, at anytime.

Point of Sale Features: Cloud Hybrid System
Run your POS system both online and offline.System can be independent from web access and data is auto-synced upon re-connection.

Suspend Sale
Place sales on hold and reopen at later time for speedy checkout.Add product. Found item not in the system? No problem, add or edit products on the fly right at POS.

Void/Return
Create returns with ease, option to print receipts with scanable barcode to speed up the process!

Speedy Product Lookup
Query products by name or code, scan barcodes, or select items from inventory list to add them to the transaction.

Real time X-report
View registers totals with breakdown of payment type at the POS with real-time data! Real-time updating means administrators viewing current numbers from anywhere at anytime!

Integrated Payments
Our PCI compliant solution provides secure payment processing X-reports by card type, electronic signature capture and PIN debit. USB plug & play hardware as well as mobile swiper option for iPad!

Mobile Selling
Run ERPLY on any device with a web browser. iPad & Andriod apps provides the freedom of mobility!

Shipping Integration
Ship products to customers via UPS and FedEx! ERPLY’s shipping module communicates directly with shipping carriers to get real-time shipping quotes, apply shipping methods, and print out shipping labels right at your register! Customers receipt prints out with tracking details, which are also saved to ERPLY backend for easy look up.

Pricing

Here is the published pricing model:

As I mentioned early, I was able to talk with them over email to ask if there was a possibility of offering our organization a cheaper rate. (THIS SECTION HAS BEEN REMOVED TO PROTECT AGREEMENT BETWEEN ERPLY/ HEARTLINE)

Summary
It would not only help everyone working at Heartline with Haitian Creations but it is also very affordable solution for us to implement. If we can utilize this software effectively and spend the time to learn and use it - it would be a huge benefit to the women in the Haitian Creation program because we would be taking care of their creations in a much more efficient, caring and reportable way. Having a system in place would allow us to be more effective today and yet allow us to easily expand in the future.