Founded in 1993, Evergreen Enterprises is a wholesale B2C home goods supplier headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, with a sourcing office in Ningbo, China. After three decades of operations, the company remains founder-led and family-centric. With innovation and creativity at the heart of all its product assortments, the store was the first to offer ‘Essentials for Country Living’.
The main product offerings include garden and outdoor living—providing flags, doormats, door decor, functional and decorative pieces for birding, wildlife, gardening, pillows, patio furniture, and more. Catering to indoor selections, the company offers lighting, candles, home accents, wall art, storage, rugs, pillows, furniture, tabletop pieces, drinkware, and kitchen accessories. While growth was exciting, the company needed help keeping track of countless items across multiple locations.
Tracking with spreadsheets: Lost items and missing Information
Before switching to EZOfficeInventory, the Creative Operations team at Evergreen Enterprises used an unshared spreadsheet to track thousands of samples. Barry Long, Creative Operations Manager at Evergreen Enterprises, talks about the challenges of working with product samples at their Madison, Virginia, office.
Inability to locate items
A typical workflow at Evergreen Enterprises involves product samples being moved to various locations for product development, a photoshoot, back to the warehouse, and then to showrooms. With no clear tracking, it was very difficult to ensure all samples were returned on time and placed in the correct location.
“All these samples are placed in a 7-acre warehouse where some would just essentially disappear”, says Barry. Since the samples were moved around a lot, no one knew the exact status of the item unless they had it in their own hands or it was communicated verbally.
Incomplete sample records
Staff members often needed help finding product samples in such a large warehouse due to the lack of concrete information in the spreadsheets. The sheets only included brief descriptions, which needed to be more comprehensive to locate a specific sample among thousands.
Other than this, the limited information in Excel sheets needed more instructions on product handling. Some product samples are small commodity items, while others are one-of-a-kind prototype goods. The staff members involved would need to find out whether an item was easily replaceable or a prototype that required special care.
Venturing to global asset management with EZOfficeInventory
Evergreen Enterprises decided to switch to EZOfficeInventory in 2015. During these 8 years, they have expanded their business within the USA, Canada, and China. With all their sample data in one place, asset management is easier, quicker, and more convenient.
“Today, we have roughly ten times more items than we were tracking before or even more,” says Barry.
Joshua Winn, Sr. Studio Photographer, and the EZOfficeInventory Project Manager, along with Barry, talked about some of the prominent benefits of using EZOfficeInventory for their workflows:
Logging sample records on the move
Product development at Evergreen Enterprises involves a lot of product sample movements across different locations. Here are some ways how check-ins and checkouts are used at the home decor company:
1. Mobile check-ins and checkouts
Information regarding a product sample movement is recorded in EZOfficeInventory and updated in real-time. For example, anytime a shoot is scheduled hundreds of miles away, a staff member uses the mobile app to scan and verify whether all requested items have been boarded on the vehicle. Doing so saves time and inconvenience if an item is left out before traveling for miles.
Barry says, “Costs have been cut down 3 times based on a weekly schedule. Otherwise, we would have 5 sample coordinators wandering a 7-acre warehouse trying to find items based on spreadsheet descriptions.”
2. Assistive sample visuals
Barry and Joshua pointed out that the ability to upload images for samples has been an immense help. Before EZOfficeInventory, it would take hours to find an item in the showroom because the user would need to figure out what to look for. The images provide a clear reference as to how the sample looks, especially in cases of multiple models.
3. Multi-national asset tracking
The company has recently implemented an international product information management system. EZOfficeInventory has facilitated asset information across borders using APIs and AINS. This has helped the overseas product development teams to update sample records in one system. By doing this, the teams can print packing labels with the barcode/QR code from EZOfficeInventory and quickly scan them anywhere. Having this level of automation and visibility for US teams has greatly reduced the overheads of manually generating records and streamlined the receiving process in both Richmond, VA, and Madison, VA locations.
4. Tracking locations for sample photography
With the help of EZOfficeInventory, Joshua can quickly preview a product sample status, know if it was approved by product development, and assign it to offices in Ningbo, China, Madison, VA, or Richmond, VA facility. The studio team then scans the product sample as received and updates the records upon completion of each photography phase.
The showroom team then assigns a UPC in EZOfficeInventory, tags the samples, and updates the sample’s location to where it was assigned within the showrooms.
Each step of the product sample lifecycle, beginning from the vendor, shipping, photography, showroom, and until it is retired, takes place at a different location tracked in EZOfficeInventory.
Joshua says, “Location tracking is one of the biggest benefits for us because our showroom holds 20,000 items, and it’s very important for us to know where things are”.
Managing sample lifecycle
Joshua mentions how EZOfficeInventory has been useful as a sales lifecycle management tool. The sales team utilizes the showrooms to store items for wholesale buyers, so there is a constant influx of new items coming in and older ones getting retired. All this information is recorded in EZOfficeInventory, making sample data accessible to anyone who is logged in.
“There are thousands of products in the showroom, and we are not just using the app to track the samples, but also what creative content was completed on each sample and any important notes concerning the product,” says Barry.
Collaborating photography workflows
The product development team uses EZOfficeInventory as a photography tracker to ensure all the required shots are taken and updated in the system. When a photographer gets a sample, he receives a list with all the items coming in or undergoing photography. Then, they can scan barcode labels to check which photos or videos have been completed.
“We have been able to speed up our operations by using EZOfficeInventory two times for instant access to sample data at all times,” says Joshua.
Joshua explained that prior to EZOfficeInventory, our product development and studio teams never knew what product samples would arrive each day.
“We were completely in the dark, very reactive, dependent upon spreadsheets, scrambling to review products and create content without preparation. Not knowing daily what was going to arrive was a major point of stress for all teams. Today, with EZOfficeInventory tracking, we are now a very pro-active, agile workplace that can better streamline our workflows in advance, knowing each sample’s location and status,” says Joshua.
Joshua also mentions that they have created custom fields to record specifications in the product sheets to track each photography phase and video completion status. Access to detailed information about sample status enables teams to effectively schedule the next steps, avoid conflicts, and let other departments know what creative content is available for sales and marketing.
Forecasting with valuable insights
Barry and Joshua use the report’s functionality to facilitate leadership in making informed decisions and tracking project deadlines.
According to Barry, reports help the leadership team quickly assess pending tasks for a sample. For instance, reports at Evergreen Enterprises show the number of samples shipped, received, awaiting approval, or undergoing photography. Accurate representation of sample workflow enables leadership to balance creative and labor resources, which was impossible before.
Another report includes data on sample timelines. Say a sample with 4000 items was due in 3 weeks, and leadership wants to know how many items have yet to arrive. Barry and Joshua would run a report and have the exact numbers within a few clicks.
Advanced asset management and expansion plans with EZOfficeInventory
Barry and Joshua are more than satisfied with the EZOfficeInventory system and state that it is very easy to use. They emphasized that the support team has been tremendously helpful and was pivotal during the expansions of asset tracking across the USA, Canada, and China offices. With the extensive tracking offered by the software, they are looking forward to their processes becoming further efficient and streamlined, saving costs and manual labor.
