Case study

Jayed Products and Services

If efficiency and productivity are what you need – Skynamo can help!

Four or five years ago, the team at Jayed Products and Services were first exposed to Skynamo through a vendor they distributed for.

“They wanted us to handle distribution for them, and they were on the Skynamo platform,” says director Jamie Binsbergen. “Since we were calling on their clients on their behalf, in a sub-distribution type of arrangement, we used Skynamo too. We were using it the way they had it set up, but we could see the benefits. So, when that contract ended, we brought it into our own business, starting in a very basic form and growing into it over time, where today it encompasses our whole business. We run our whole team around it now.”

Jayed Products and Services is a distribution company that deals in FMCG and consumables to the retail sector. The business began as a distributer of digital consumables, mainly to Spars and independent retailers, and over the past 20 years has grown into further digital lines, popular household lines and many food and health lines. They service about 200 Spar retailers, hardware chain stores, cash and carry’s, and many smaller independent retailers like garage shops, butcheries, and small independent retailers.

Their sales team comprises seven in-house salespeople and four independent contractors in the Western Cape, with the Johannesburg team covering Gauteng, Limpopo and Mpumalanga too.

It’s a small team, with a large footprint, which Jamie says is exactly why they needed Skynamo, previous paper-based systems would never have given the efficiencies now allowed by Skynamo.

“The main reason we were using paper-based was because we had been exposed to field software in the past and it was extremely cumbersome,” he explained. “And it was that thing of, technology’s fantastic, but we work on time as well. You get guys that write extremely smart software, but they’re not retailers, so they don’t always understand how much time some of these processes take in the field. We were losing huge amounts of calls a day. And we went back to a paper-based system based on that.”

There are huge benefits to be gained from using Skynamo for any business, he says, “but I think the best benefit is for small businesses. Generally they won’t have access to this amount of power at that kind of cost. Big businesses can afford tailor-made systems, which we can’t. All of a sudden, we could compete with the efficiencies of the big guys with a fairly low-cost software.”

And compete they have. In the four or five years they’ve used Skynamo, Jamie says they have doubled their turnover. “Skynamo is definitely a massive part of it, because our whole business is run through Skynamo, which links to our Sage financial system,” he says. “Those two systems run our whole business.

“Obviously, nothing replaces sound business practice or great staff, but Skynamo has given us the tools to put this all together very efficiently and affordably. These efficiencies in our processes would not have been possible without Skynamo – I can definitely give them credit.”

He says when new salespeople join the team, they are immediately wary, worried they will be policed. “But the thing is, if you’re doing your job, you don’t have a problem with it,” Jamie points out. “We see it more as a coaching tool – because the transparency on the app helps us to see why someone is failing, so we can help them before they lose their job due to a lack of performance.

“If one of our team members is failing, then we are failing as a company,” he continues. “So, if you are a purposeful slacker, you’re not going to survive in my business. But if you’re a guy who works hard, we’re going to assist you, and we’re going to make sure that you win. We have the data, we can see where you’re going wrong, and we’re going to help you.”

Just recently, he says, they noticed that one of their staff members was working until 6pm, and it’s against company policy to cut into people’s family time. “Before we might not have noticed that,” he says. “This guy was battling, so he was putting in the extra hours because he obviously didn’t want to lose his job. So, I called him, and we worked out a way to help him. If you’re fair about it, it is there to make sure the whole team’s working well. But it’s also there for us to understand if our team is struggling, so that we know about it early.”

He says the team have found Skynamo easy adopt and use. Jayed provides in-house training, and within a week, people have the hang of the app. When they first started using it, he says, they phased it in slowly.

“We started with Skynamo as just an order system, to get rid of the old paper-based clipboard system. The guys processed their orders, and the orders were sucked into Sage. Previously, when a guy walked out of the store, we would have to wait for him to come into the office to hand all his paperwork in before we could process it. So just that efficiency was great – now when he walks out of the store, that order is in Sage five minutes later, ready for processing.

“I had a full-time person that would just sit and capture orders. So, when that job didn’t exist anymore, we could use that person somewhere else in our growing company. But we saved an entire staff member in those efficiencies. And then picking and packing could happen five minutes after the sales rep walked out of the retail store, rather than having to start packing that order the following day. So, the efficiencies are definitely hugely improved.”

Team communication has also improved, he says: “What’s nice is everyone’s got access to the information. So, we’ve got a merchandising manager who can sit and check stores from within the office. If there’s anything that we’re not happy with, we can place it on that person’s Skynamo calendar, which will tell him what needs to be fixed on his next store visit. He, in turn, also captures a whole bunch of data when he’s in the store, which comes back to us. So, we all have access to the same data. And we’re all feeding that data all the time.”

The team’s admin burden has also been reduced. “It’s removed a lot of duplication,” says Jamie. “An order is placed once, and no one is altering that data.”

Finally, he says, one of the biggest benefits is the integration between Skynamo and the company’s financial system. “I think if you use the two separately, the benefits are not nearly the same,” he says. “But as soon as you integrate the two, it makes a huge difference to the efficiencies of your business.”