Nautique Parts Sails Into Smoother Operations With Brightpearl and Inventory Planner

“We considered NetSuite, but it was literally twice the price of Brightpearl and didn’t seem as flexible.” – David DeAndrade, General Manager, Nautique Parts

Background

After running a bricks-and-mortar dealership for 70 years, the team behind Nautique Parts didn’t know what to expect when they ventured into online sales during the Great Recession.

They needn’t have worried.

What started as a side project quickly gained momentum. The team predicted $50K in online revenue in year one, but ended up tripling that. Sales then doubled year on year for the next three years.

It was an exciting new chapter for the North Carolina-based family firm, which specializes in boat parts – but one that quickly exposed the limitations of their systems, which at the time were limited to QuickBooks and Excel spreadsheets.

“We started to realise that what worked well for a little brick-and-mortar store wasn’t going to cut it in the e-commerce world,” says David DeAndrade, the brand’s general manager.

“We considered NetSuite, but it was literally twice the price of Brightpearl and didn’t seem as flexible.

“When I told the Netsuite sales rep we were opting for Brightpearl, they offered to match the price – but my question was ‘What happens at renewal!?’. I knew the price would take a massive jump.

“It was clear Brightpearl would give us much more bang for our buck and was a better fit for our business, so that’s what we did and we haven’t looked back.”

Charting a new course

As a leading retail operating system, Brightpearl is packed with built-for-retail features including market-leading inventory planning and a game-changing Automation Engine. The system is deployed by experts using a unique approach which gets retailers live in weeks (rather than months, like legacy ERPs).

Crucially for Nautique Parts, Brightpearl includes a huge library of Plug & Play integrations which offer native, ‘out of the box’ connections to leading apps and tools, including to the company’s BigCommerce webstore and marketplaces.

David says: “It was a real win to be able to connect instantly with BigCommerce and then to Magento when we acquired a competitor.”

“It’s very good to know we can add marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart without worrying that the team will need to learn a whole new system – we know Brightpearl will connect to it, all you have to do is ‘plug’ it in.”

“The automation power that comes with Brightpearl is great. We automate all our dropshipping orders, for instance, and we could automate lots more.”

With 5,000 SKUs across multiple inventory locations, Nautique Parts was struggling to accurately forecast demand and plan its purchasing using static Excel spreadsheets.

As part of their Brightpearl subscription, the business opted for access to Inventory Planner.

As a top-rated inventory planning tool, Inventory Planner reveals which inventory to order, how much to order, and the perfect moment to order it, based on an accurate calculation of how much a retailer will sell.

Its accurate forecasting factors in supplier timescales, seasonality and promotions alongside historical sales data. It then translates the forecasts into automatic buying recommendations.

The benefit? Smarter stock decisions, stronger cash flow and less money tied up in slow-moving inventory.

Ship-shape and set for success

“We joke that we couldn’t do our jobs without it, but it’s actually true.”

– David DeAndrade, General Manager, Nautique Parts

David says: “Inventory Planner has definitely made our day-to-day a bit easier – less hocus pocus and more data analytics.”

“It takes out the guesswork when working out what to buy and always has up-to-date data for us to quickly peruse. It means we can go to our dashboard and see that we’ve got inventory to last 36 days, or whatever the number is.”

“We also use it to automate our POs, keep track of what’s on order and arrange warehouse transfers. We joke that we couldn’t do our jobs without it, but it’s actually true.”

“As a tool, I know it’s got more horsepower under the hood and we’ve just been tapping the pedal so I’m excited to do even more with it.”

With plans in place to move to a new warehouse, expand their marketplaces and adapt to changes in the e-commerce landscape, Nautique Parts can be confident that they have a future-proof operating system that can handle whatever the future brings.

Find out how Brightpearl and Inventory Planner can help your business grow with a free demo.