Golden Protective Services keeps its inventory in check with Brightpearl

The background

Golden Protective Services is a wholesale and retail business from Carrollton, Ohio in the USA. They began trading 20 years ago, initially as a wholesaler of safety and food service products. As oil fracking took off across the state about 5 years ago, the population of the local area grew from less than 3000 people to over 9000 in under a year.

To meet the needs of the growing number of workers coming to the area, Golden Protective Services diversified and opened a brick and mortar retail store, becoming a retail and wholesale business. As the company started to grow even further, they moved their business online and began trading on their own Shopify-powered website, as well as selling on Amazon and eBay.

The challenge

“Prior to coming to Brightpearl, we were using a ten year old accounting system which didn’t work at all with our growing online needs,” Donna Best, Director of Operations told us. “We were looking to change because we felt like our future was omnichannel sales and the software we were using could not support what we were trying to do as a business. We were updating our inventory every single day by hand. It was just not a scalable solution.”

Golden Protective Services needed a robust, back office system that would scale with them as they grew. Multichannel selling presented a unique issue for Golden Protective Services too. They needed to be able to gain ground in an ecommerce world, and do so quickly. They needed to find a system that had real omnichannel capabilities and could provide live inventory management functions and accurate real-time reporting.

Key Challenges:

• No support for online sales channels

• Inventory updates being keyed in daily by hand

• Lack of effective inventory management reporting

The solution

Golden Protective Services found what they were looking for in Brightpearl. “The reason we chose Brightpearl was the capability to have a single live inventory and omnichannel selling system – that’s what we needed as a company,” Donna explains.

Moving systems can be a daunting prospect. “We were moving from a very old system, one that did not support an online presence at all, so we were expecting the process of moving to be painful,” Donna recalls. “However, the implementation and customer support from Brightpearl made the process of moving platforms far less challenging than we’d thought. They made us feel like we were taken care of and never abandoned along the way. Everything was well prepared and timely,” Donna told us.

Initially concerned by the cost of buying an out-of-the-box solution compared to their array of in-house legacy systems, Golden Protective Services have found that the benefits have more than outweighed the cost. “Brightpearl paid for itself immediately just by the way we can make better business decisions and manage the timeflow of our employees.”

Donna goes on to say: “We were looking for the flexibility and reporting to get our information out faster in the format that we needed to make better, informed business decisions. We got all that with Brightpearl.”

“Our staff are just happier on this platform than they were prior to using this system!” Donna told us. “We’ve been able to save money in headcount but have also become more efficient as a whole. We used to key in shipping info by hand and that’s fully automated now.”

Key Strengths:

• Full cloud-based omnichannel support

• Real-time live inventory updates

• Real-time live inventory reporting

The future

Golden Protective Services’ future remains bright and solidly omnichannel. “Our goal for the next five years is to continue to grow our wholesale division through better buying and vigorously pursuing new sales opportunities,” Donna told us. “Golden Protective Services will also be focused on strengthening online sales channels while exploring new online sales opportunities,” said Donna.

Prior to using Brightpearl, they managed their business on spreadsheets. Now a thing of the past, they have the space to grow and the time to strategize in a way that the company had never been able to do before.

www.goldenprotective.com