The Client
Totally Wicked is one of the founding businesses of the UK vaping industry. Established in 2008, it continues to be at the forefront of the industry, paving the way for people to quit smoking and move to vaping.
The Group employs over 400 people in its head office, retail stores, e-liquid production facilities, warehouse and distribution business. With 150 Totally Wicked branded retail stores, it is one of the largest high street vaping presences in the UK. As well as a leading online store, it partners with major retailers including CoOp, SPAR and Asda, and more than 600 garage forecourts. Its successful German division operates two dedicated retail stores and an online shop, with the brand additionally represented at over 400 garage forecourts and retailers.
The Challenge
The electronic cigarettes and e-liquid market is expanding rapidly as the role of electronic cigarettes in quitting smoking becomes more widely understood. Over 15 years, Totally Wicked’s business model has continued to be successful, with a focus on customer retention and satisfaction, together with the highest quality products, ensuring record results.
The business is aware that as customer expectations constantly change and ecommerce accelerates, order fulfilment to service the various routes to market need to be seamless and swift. Totally Wicked needed its IT infrastructure to provide the automation and integration it needed to create a future-ready business.
The Solution
To ensure a smooth journey towards an automated, streamlined and scalable infrastructure, Totally Wicked selected SAP Business One. This intelligent ERP software allows Totally Wicked to automate business processes across its operations, drive innovation and achieve greater agility and resilience.
Pulling operational management data together
Totally Wicked has consolidated its operational data across its three companies, the Totally Wicked business in Blackburn, Lancashire, UK Vapor Brands, a leading wholesaler based in Accrington and Totally Wicked, Germany.
Although UK Vapour Brands maintains its own SAP system, integration through Codeless BPA means all orders come centrally into the one Totally Wicked SAP system. This has helped the three businesses stay agile but allow Totally Wicked to introduce new business processes quickly and seamlessly and gain access to real-time data across the whole enterprise for the first time.
Integrating automated business solutions
Totally Wicked is taking advantage of standard integrations for SAP Business One, enabling it to automate and control every aspect of its business. Using Codeless BPA, Totally Wicked is extending its business process management capabilities within SAP Business One including multi-channel e-commerce and courier integration.
The integration of EPOS Now, Totally Wicked’s e-point of sale system with SAP Business One is significantly streamlining business operations by ensuring that all sales transactions are automatically recorded in SAP. This helps the business manage its inventory, finances and customer data more effectively.
Chris Milne, ERP System Manager at Totally Wicked says, “The integration task of EPOS Now creates five financial journals overnight for five tender types; card, cash, JustEat, Smoking Cessation and Petty Cash, saving a member of our accounts team almost a full day each week.”
Time savings through automating tasks have also been achieved working with major customer, Amazon. An integration task has been created to process Amazon orders from a csv file, and automatically creating the sales order, AR invoice and subsequent payment, saving an hour per week by reducing manual intervention.
Integrating courier services through APIs with SAP Business One is also streamlining logistics and shipping operations by automating tasks such as order tracking, shipping label generation and real-time status updates.
These automations allow the finance and logistics teams to focus on tasks that add more value to the business.
Seamless wholesale distribution
Stock is shipped easily between stores and warehouses to meet customer demand, with goods receipts and inventory levels managed automatically on the system ensuring accuracy and real-time data. Warehouse pickers can then pick end to end in the right order based on the information they are given, saving time and effort.
Chris explains, “Because the information is accurate and up to date, the pickers are able to walk bin to bin structurally through the aisles to fulfil each order quickly and efficiently.”
Delivering on customer experience
With an ever-increasing volume of orders, Totally Wicked is fully optimising its SAP Business One automated business solution to meet customer demand.
“If we hadn’t automated these business processes with SAP Business One, we would be struggling to keep up with demand,”highlights Chris “We have reduced manual intervention as much as possible by putting in automation into our core processes. The outcome is a much more efficient and dynamic operation, leading to a better customer experience.”
Chris Milne
ERP System Manager, Totally Wicked
