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Ocean
Junior Member
USA
75 Posts |
 Posted - 07/16/2009 : 3:14:13 PM
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It may be a bit premature for me to write a testimonial as our company has been using Stone Edge for just a few months, but it has already dramatically impacted our operations, so I thought I'd start a journal and update it periodically.
Before Stone Edge, we used ChannelAdvisor and Shipworks. We still use ChannelAdvisor, but we have replaced Shipworks with Stone Edge (enterprise version).
We're a seasonal business (Halloween), shipping around 100 orders per day in the off-season and 1000-2000 orders per day in Sept/Oct with minor spikes during our swimsuit season. We were having quality control issues (shipping errors). Seasonal/Temp workers are just not going to be as reliable as regular staff, but everyone is human, so we needed to find a barcoded shipping solution to eliminate shipping errors. We chose Stone Edge.
The shipping errors definitely went away after we implemented Stone Edge, but Stone Edge offered so much more than just quality control in shipping. Generating purchase orders was a huge bonus for this program. Managing orders from vendors used to be a 50 hour per week job in Aug/Sept/Oct. Hopefully now it will be pretty automated. But there are so many more features to Stone Edge than the POs and barcoded shipping, most of which we have not explored yet.
Stone Edge is an out of the box software program that tries to fit everyone's needs and it doesn't exactly do everything that we need it to do, but the great thing about this program is that it runs on MS Access and SQL server, so most programmers will be able to customize it to do exactly what you need. We did finally hire an IT guy, but so far we've found it to be more cost effective to outsource our Stone Edge customizations.
Finally, the customer service has been great (OK, it's been a bit slower lately, but the response time is still really good). Their top level programmers are very helpful on the forums. We went into production with their beta version (5.807)--God bless their patience.
I don't think it's possible to find a comparable program at the price that Stone Edge offers (not even close). I think Barney is cheapening his brand by offering it at such a low price, but then again, I'm in the business to sell costumes, not software, so I'm sure there's a method to his madness :) This program is worth a lot more than what Barney is charging for it.
If you haven't jumped on the Stone Edge wagon yet, there are some things that you may want to consider:
1. It's extremely feature rich, but tons of features also means more time required to learn them. The learning curve is pretty steep. Don't expect to download it on Monday and be in full production on Tuesday.
2. The enterprise version requires a bigger financial and time investment than just the Stone Edge software itself. You'll need a server and server software, which can get pretty pricey. Sure there's the free SQL server options, but if your database demands surpass what Access can handle, you'll outgrow the free SQL server very quickly.
3. It's user interface looks like it came from the 1980s, making it more Stone Age than Stone Edge, and it's not as intuitive as some of its competitors, but we chose Stone Edge over all its competitors for customizability and functionality, not looks.
I hope my review has been helpful. I will update it after we have survived our first season.
And if you're looking for a costume... :) |
www.costumealibi.com
www.bikiniblvd.com
www.mycostumeworld.com
www.stores.ebay.com/fashionbloom
www.stores.ebay.com/bikiniblvd
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Edited by - Ocean on 07/16/2009 3:24:40 PM |
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Ocean
Junior Member
USA
75 Posts |
Posted - 09/24/2009 : 8:24:14 PM
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Update:
Ok, we're beginning to see the real potential of Stone Edge Order Manager. Our seasonal volume has doubled last year's so far. Stone Edge doesn't really help us sell more, but it helps us do it much more efficiently. Our staff has been cut by half compared to last year at this time and our productivity and accuracy is amazing. My stress levels have reduced dramatically compared to last year. October is still yet to come, but it seems like the more we ship, the more noticeable Stone Edge's efficiency becomes. When we first implemented this in the off season, my partners were questioning my decision to use Stone Edge--it was a costly initial investment, but thank God we got Stone Edge when we did.
Some things we learned:
1. barcoding over 12,000+ SKUs was not easy, especially with new inventory coming in every day. We had to revamp our entire data entry and receiving procedures. It's really messy now, but after this season is over, we can make adjustments to make it flow better.
2. recording weights for 12,000+ is also challenging, especially with new rotating inventory. Again, we will make adjustments in the off season to make it work
The above "problems" aren't limitations of Stone Edge. They're actually caused by the limitations of our old system that did not support weights and barcoding. Stone Edge just solves those problems.
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www.costumealibi.com
www.bikiniblvd.com
www.mycostumeworld.com
www.stores.ebay.com/fashionbloom
www.stores.ebay.com/bikiniblvd
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zeebop
New Member
USA
36 Posts |
Posted - 09/25/2009 : 11:51:00 AM
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quote:
[i]Originally posted by Ocean[/i]
[br]Update:
Ok, we're beginning to see the real potential of Stone Edge Order Manager. Our seasonal volume has doubled last year's so far. Stone Edge doesn't really help us sell more, but it helps us do it much more efficiently. Our staff has been cut by half compared to last year at this time and our productivity and accuracy is amazing. My stress levels have reduced dramatically compared to last year. October is still yet to come, but it seems like the more we ship, the more noticeable Stone Edge's efficiency becomes. When we first implemented this in the off season, my partners were questioning my decision to use Stone Edge--it was a costly initial investment, but thank God we got Stone Edge when we did.
Some things we learned:
1. barcoding over 12,000+ SKUs was not easy, especially with new inventory coming in every day. We had to revamp our entire data entry and receiving procedures. It's really messy now, but after this season is over, we can make adjustments to make it flow better.
2. recording weights for 12,000+ is also challenging, especially with new rotating inventory. Again, we will make adjustments in the off season to make it work
The above "problems" aren't limitations of Stone Edge. They're actually caused by the limitations of our old system that did not support weights and barcoding. Stone Edge just solves those problems.
We had trouble for a little while with the weight thing, but then just wrote a query that allows us to see items that are in stock, that we sell online, and that need weights. Try this;
SELECT Inventory.LocalSKU, Inventory.ItemName, Inventory.ActualWeight, Inventory.Location
FROM Inventory
WHERE (((Inventory.ActualWeight) Is Null) AND ((Inventory.Integer1)=1) AND ((Inventory.QOH)<>0))
ORDER BY Inventory.Location;
for us Inventory.Integer1=1 is how we know we sell something online (there are items we only sell in our store, and not online) it then orders it by the location so the items are easy to find. You can print it and pull one of every item so they can be scanned and weighed, or you can make the changes right in this table and they will be reflected in the inventory table.
You may find it needs to be changed slightly to work for your needs, but I find it is a great way to keep my weights up to date. My warehouse manager runs this query daily to see what needs weights and gets it taken care of. |
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Ocean
Junior Member
USA
75 Posts |
Posted - 10/31/2009 : 8:47:11 PM
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We finally got weights on everything, and it is now part of the data entry process for all new SKUs. Some challenges we face now (not Stone Edge's fault) are when manufacturers switch barcodes on us mid-season or uses the same barcode for different child SKUs, i.e. size small, medium, large of the same style all have the same barcodes.
OK, so our first peak season with Stone Edge is finally over, and it was great. For a stretch of 6 days in October, we processed 2,000+ orders per day. There are Stone Edge customers who ship much more than 2,000 orders per day, but it was pretty challenging for us increasing our normal annual volume 20x in a very short amount of time.
We couldn't have made it without Stone Edge. Not even close. And we couldn't have sold as much as we did without Stone Edge's ability to easily identify which SKUs needed to be reordered and when. However, I saw some major problems with Stone Edge that would impede our company's ability to grow.
1. Importing orders from ChannelAdvisor is extremely slow when volume exceeds 1,200 - 1,500 orders/day. At our peak of 2,000-2,200 orders/day, even importing a batch of 100 orders took about 40 minutes. My following comparison is between 2 different imports of roughly 100 orders each. One import is done every 24 hours during non peak times and the other import is done every hour during peak season, both generating about 100 orders, but non peak season takes about 7 minutes compared to nearly 40 minutes during peak season. The import process seems to go through 5 phases (that I know of): Phase 1. downloading checkout reports. This process doesn't just look at the new checkout reports (as Shipworks does) it cycles through about 36 hours of checkout reports and collects data from the new checkout reports. The more orders on a checkout report, the longer it takes. We generate a checkout report every hour, and normally this phase takes about 1-2 minutes. Peak week takes about 6-7 minutes. Phase 2. Next Stone Edge "checks orders" presumably to prevent duplicate orders from importing. This probably would not be necessary if it could import only the new checkout reports instead of the entire previous 36 hours. So it checks through 4,000+ orders for each import, which takes 6-7 minutes. Phase 3. An XML file is generated. Normally takes about 1-2 seconds. Peak is about 1 minute. Phase 4. Import orders from the XML file. This phase is normally completed within a minute for 100 orders, but for the same number of orders during peak times takes 15-20 minutes. 5. The final phase is order processing where pre-configured rules are applied. This phase is unchanged between peak and non-peak times. 100 orders take roughly 6-7 minutes to "process" whether we've shipped 200 or 4,000 orders in the last 36 hours.
Stone Edge doesn't currently have the capability to auto import, so we needed to manually import orders every hour to make sure the software could keep up with the number of orders that we were getting. But even if we had the capability to auto import, there still exists this limitation with the Stone Edge-ChannelAdvisor integration of having to unnecessarily cycle through thousands of old orders to import the latest orders. We would like to double our inventory next year with the expectations of doubling our sales volume, but Stone Edge literally wouldn't be able to handle 4,000 orders per day from ChannelAdvisor because each import would exceed one hour, so it wouldn't be able to keep up with ChannelAdvisor's minimum checkout report generation frequency of 1 hour. If there are any ChannelAdvisor customers shipping that volume on a daily basis with Stone Edge I'd love to know how you do it.
2. Live inventory updates do not work with Channel Advisor if you have shared (pooled) inventory between multiple channeladvisor posting accounts, which we do. This requires a manual inventory export, then import into channeladvisor. This caused roughly 1-3 oversells per day in October. It's not a large percentage of our orders, but I'd like to see that number be 0. Unlike problem #1 above, we have a customizable solution for this problem. It's a 3rd party software program that detects inventory level changes in our SQL database and automatically updates that onto ChannelAdvisor.
Stone Edge is a great program, but it has its limits. It integrates with some carts better than others. If you ship 3,000+ orders/day with ChannelAdvisor, I wouldn't recommend using Stone Edge. |
www.costumealibi.com
www.bikiniblvd.com
www.mycostumeworld.com
www.stores.ebay.com/fashionbloom
www.stores.ebay.com/bikiniblvd
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Barney Stone
Administrator
USA
5517 Posts |
Posted - 11/04/2009 : 11:41:39 AM
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We should be dealing with both of your issues in the next few months. First of all, we are currently wrapping up a major development effort to dramatically improve importing orders from all of the shopping carts that we support. Those changes should improve the time that it takes to import orders as well as the problems that sometimes occur with bad or problem data in the orders. Those changes will be included in Standard, Plus POS and Enterprise versions of the Order Manager. For Enterprise users, we will also be adding automatic scheduled imports.
You have also identified an issue specific to high-volume ChannelAdvisor users, and we will look into fixing that, too.
And we also plan to add support for inventory tracking with pooled shopping carts.
Look for all of those changes in Q1-Q2 of 2010. |
Barney Stone, President
Stone Edge Technologies, Inc.
610-994-3699 ext. 111 |
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stretch361
Junior Member
92 Posts |
Posted - 11/04/2009 : 2:44:18 PM
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| What type of custom things have you done to stone edge? We are always looking for ideas on how to improve our processes - and trying to get an idea of what type of custom things that have been done in the past. |
Chris Potter
Potter's Gifts
Best Costume Site |
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rich1231
New Member
United Kingdom
7 Posts |
Posted - 11/08/2009 : 02:59:02 AM
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Barney,
will this impact the generic cart import details? And the docs for those?
Thanks
Richard
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Barney Stone
Administrator
USA
5517 Posts |
Posted - 11/09/2009 : 11:26:59 AM
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Richard -
We do not expect to make any changes in our API. The changes will all be within the Order Manager. So any script that works with the current Order Manager should continue to work for the foreseeable future. |
Barney Stone, President
Stone Edge Technologies, Inc.
610-994-3699 ext. 111 |
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My Order Manager Journal
