How Yoga Bar Raised the Bar Higher by Achieving a 99.9% Order Fulfillment Rate with Unicommerce
Yoga Bar improved inventory reconciliation and maintained smooth workflow despite 160% catalog growth, thanks to tailored solutions that addressed spillage issues.
What Yoga Bar Achieved Using Unicommerce?
99.99%+ Order Fulfillment Rate
16X Growth in Sale Orders in 19 Months
160% Growth in Catalog Size
1.9 Lakh+ Live Inventory Count
Expansion in Sales Channels from 7 to 11
About Yoga Bar – Nutrition-Led Food Company
To make people eat, love, repeat, and practice yum-asana every day, is Yoga Bar’s mission. It’s a nutrition-led food company, founded by Suhasini Sampath and Anindita Sampath in the year 2014. As one of the leading brands, it stood out and countered the retailer attitude in India which was limited to selling only what’s tasty and not what’s healthy.
With the core strength of understanding their customers and the mantra of providing 80% better quality in this niche of food products, Yoga Bar received a positive response and a significant amount of repeated customer base. It is the brand that represents the modern needs of contemporary Indian consumers perfectly. Now that it is expanding towards children and infant food. Yoga Bar are one of a kind.
However, as an FMCG brand, they needed a unique solution to overcome the expiry management and streamline inventory effortlessly. Hence, they decided to onboard Unicommerce as their technology provider and ensure smooth and efficient operations.
Challenges Faced by Yoga Bar
- Need for an Integrated Ecosystem – The brand aimed to expand its market presence by increasing availability in every small marketplace, seeking to ensure comprehensive visibility across all platforms. To achieve this, they needed adaptable and scalable APIs rather than direct marketplace integration as it calls for a significant amount of long processes and efforts. The requirement also has to keep high standards of service and precise quality and quantity of fetching the order details.
- Discrepancy with Lost in Transit Inventory – The amount of damaged inventory during transit was one of the major issues faced by the brand. The discrepancy was inevitable but catering to that was one of the tasks! Yoga Bar’ inventory flow begins at the manufacturing unit, then moves to the mother warehouse, and finally gets distributed to the other two child warehouses. During these transitions, frequent episodes of flawed inventory occurred, and there was no way to account for it in the documentation. This led to an increase in the damaged goods with no way to reconcile them in the records.
For instance, If 100 packets were sent to the warehouse from the mother warehouse and 20 were damaged during the transit. There was no way to report this discrepancy. According to the gate pass, the warehouse had to receive the 100 packets despite the actual loss. This was affecting the inventory count and business both regularly and significantly.
- Need for an Expiry Management System – Like any other FMCG brand, expiry management is one of the most crucial parts of the operations. Including those dealing with healthy food items with a very limited life span. Ingredients used in the healthy snack items have limited shelf life. Managing the timeline from manufacturing to the warehouse and ultimately to the customers is one of the important tasks to avoid selling expired products and affecting the brand image with the customers.
Yoga Bar is one of the brands that sell on different marketplaces and have more than a single warehouse. They required a consolidated flow of operations where it would be easier for them to manage all the data related to the inventory, order processing, and all the operations. They sought a platform that could give them central visibility, and streamlined inventory management with a comprehensive view of operations to function seamlessly.
Solutions offered by Unicommerce
- Robust Integrations: – Yoga Bar wanted to amplify their presence on small marketplaces. They were able to achieve this by using our robust e-commerce API Integrations. Not only were they able to capture the precise order details but also adjusted their inventory in real time. As a result, they experienced remarkable sales order growth rates in recent months with the utmost efficiency. This, as a practice, has successfully solidified their position in the competitive market.
- Short Closing at Gate Pass: – Yoga Bar was facing a regular discrepancy due to the damage of the inventory from the parent warehouse to the child warehouse. According to the documentation, there were no means of keeping the record for these incidents which led to mentioning it as pending.
The damaged inventory was only recorded under the accepted number of the products which hiked the amount of discrepancies in the inventory and became a regular problem. Therefore, the reconciliation in records was provided. This was done by providing an option to mark that inventory under ‘lost in transit’. It reduced these regular instances, as it was reviewed monthly, keeping track and decreasing the records of regular inventory damages. - Expiry Management Through Tolerance: – The most crucial part of FMCG brands like Yoga Bar is countered by setting a tolerance level. For instance, if the shelf life is set to 120 days, then the tolerance would be set to 100 days so that it would not be processed further for sale. Additionally, this was done at the SKU levels.
Secondly, customization to the reports was provided by adding a column to the shelf life reports that mentioned the manufacturing details which helped with better inventory management by the shelf lives of the products. - Customization in the Documentation: – Unicommerce provided several customizations in the documents according to Yoga Bar’ needs:
– To enhance operational efficiency, Yoga Bar wanted to assist their pickers by image-assisted sorting in the item master aiding them both in multi-picking and precise product selection.
– Other than that, for their gate passes, they wanted to specify the EAN number to mention the SKUs for smoother operational flow.
– Additionally, for the practice of cycle count which is done on the item level, Yoga Bar wanted to practice that on the SKU level. This customization was done for them which helped in making the cycle counts more efficient and reduced the probability of human error.
Impact on Yoga Bar Business
- With the powered solutions altered particularly for the brand, Yoga Bar has been able to improve its inventory reconciliation process which was needed because of the spillage. Even with the catalog growth of 160% , Yoga Bar can maintain a smooth workflow along with effective optimization of the inventory.
- Yoga Bar has achieved an excellent order fulfillment rate of 99.99%+ which indicates the regular meeting of the customer’s expectations which also made it possible to deal in four additional sales channels than before. They were previously dealing with Ajio, Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Nykaa, Nykaa Fashion, and Shopify. Later they expanded their sales to CRED, Custom, and JIO mart.
- This not only stops here, but they have achieved an exceptional 16X growth in sales order rate. Overall, the positive impact of the partnership between Yoga Bar and Unicommerce is the perfect example of scaling the business with the help of the right solutions catered in the right way. With this, Yoga Bar has positioned itself as a leading brand in the industry, gaining the trust and loyalty of customers.
Impact Highlights
- 99.99%+ Order Fulfillment Rate
- 16X Growth in Sale Orders in 19 Months
- 160% Growth in Catalog Size
- 1.9 Lakh+ Live Inventory Count
- Expansion in Sales Channels from 7 to 11