How Unicommerce strengthened GNC India’s business operations across multiple sales channels boosting 100% fulfillment rate
Company Overview
GNC, also short for Guardian, is a leading specialty retailer for health and wellness products. Having its headquarters in Pittsburgh US, the health products retailer operates on a network of approximately 9,000 locations worldwide. From Protein and Performance Supplements to Weight Management Supplements, to beauty & skincare products, GNC has a plethora of options to offer.
Having a belief in spreading health across the world, GNC has a significant global presence and continues to expand in India with the current footprint including a warehouse and over 45 stores across the country. The company has a diversified, multi-channel business model and intends to sell its products and services in India through its physical stores as well as an online medium. It would also include franchise activities, third-party contract manufacturing, e-commerce, and corporate partnerships.
With the growing customer base, the brand started getting bulk orders from marketplaces. This is when they realized they wanted to associate with Unicommerce. Unicommerce helped GNC scale its profits while helping them introduce its product portfolio to wider audiences.
Challenges : Process, Operations & Management
Being a successful global player, the company intends to scale its online operations significantly. With their presence in the online arena of Indian markets, they started working on a multi-channel business model which drives them to align their warehouse operations at a unified platform. Not only did it become hard for them to process orders quickly, but they also wanted to integrate multiple sales channels to align operations. Since it is a globally present company and sees a multi-fold growth each year, their team had specifically forecasted some of the challenges they expected to face in the Indian markets
- Lack of efficient source to process orders effectively
- Unable to integrate with 3rd Party Logistics Providers
- Unstable product inventory flow across multiple sales channels
- Inability to maintain stock freshness in supply chain
- Inaccurate reports and dashboards
Implementation Details
Collaboration with Unicommerce
After implementing the Unicommerce Warehouse Management solution, they no longer had to rely on manual processes resulting in increased productivity in terms of orders picked per person. Since their operations were completely automated and centralized, they managed to maintain stock accuracy and visibility.
Order Management Solution:
Entire lifecycle for order processing from picking, packing to dispatching and delivering was managed centrally with Unicommerce’s centralized order management solution. Unicommerce provided seamless integration with their own PHP-based website. This integration helped them to pull orders and manage inventory centrally. Also, the brand was able to completely bill from a single panel.
Customized Reports and dashboards:
The feature assisted the online retailer to analyze its sales, predict revenues and manage order flux. Apart from that, Unicommerce customized the item label barcode for them to generate random series to avoid copying and counterfeit.
Logistics Integration:
With Unicommerce’s last-mile platform integration, GNC was able to prioritise order deliveries according to the demand. Also they were able to select their preferred logistics providers as per their needs.
Advanced Warehouse Management:
The pain areas of monitoring the expiry date and keeping a track of shelf-lives of medicines and other health-related products were now easily accomplished with the implementation of FIFO, First In First Out .
Inventory Management Solution:
Unicommerce‘s unified panel supported them to manage centralized inventory in a multi-sales channel business ecosystem. Moreover, Unicommerce’s strong mechanism to handle Returns and Cancellations, helped them to make real-time inventory replenishment updates.
Results – Then and Now, How the things changed
With the Unicommerce WMS platform, the company quickly improved its warehouse management operations efficiently while maintaining a 100% order fulfillment rate through multiple sales channels. This amounted to 4.5X growth in their total sales volume.
The most positive impact Unicommerce’s Warehouse Management System has had on their business, is the fact that they have been able to scale to where they want to be and will be able to keep growing without the need to change.
GNC has been operating across 4 registered vendors, 4 warehouses and 7+ marketplaces and carts with complete ease using the advanced solutions of Unicommerce, which helped them dispatch 19K+ orders per month. Along with that, the online brand dramatically improved the overall operational needs while seamlessly maintaining 1.4K+ live catalog counts.
Products retailers increase efficiency and improve order fulfillment, which results in higher customer satisfaction and improved sales.
- Smooth operations across 4 registered vendors
- Robust inventory management enabled 19K+ dispatches per month
- Successfully handled live catalog count of 1.4K+ ensuring 100% fulfillment rates
