Stats

Food & Beverages

More than SGD $1 million of sales processed Migration of critical data, more than 10k customers 30+ retail locations, 30+ distribution locations

About

Irvins Salted Egg is a Singaporean consumer packaged goods company that is known for its wildly popular salted egg snacks. They offer a range of snack products, including potato chips, fish skin, and cassava chips, all coated in a rich and flavorful salted egg seasoning.

Founded in 2014 by the brothers Irvin and Ircahn Gunawan, it quickly gained a cult following for its unique take on traditional salted egg flavors. What sets Irvins Salted Egg apart from other snack brands is its commitment to using only the highest-quality ingredients, and its innovative approach to flavor.

The company has a central food manufacturing hub in Singapore, thriving online & offline sales presence across 30+ retail locations. Standalone retail stores include iconic locations such as Changi Airport Terminal 2 and ION Orchard.

Their international expansion plan includes distribution partnerships with major retailers. Today, Irvins Salted Egg has expanded beyond its Singaporean roots and has a presence in countries such as Malaysia, the Philippines, and the United States. The brand has become a global phenomenon, and its snacks are sought after by foodies and snack enthusiasts all over the world.

Challenges & Requirements

Back in 2019, Irvins e-commerce was running on a custom site and a custom ERP system both built and maintained by an existing software vendor. Faced with several issues, Irvins deemed their existing system to be too limited. Most notably, the challenges include:

Custom e-commerce sites requires a lot of specialized work to maintain. This is a nightmare for Irvins whose core business and focus is not in software development or delivery.
Customer churn & dissatisfaction due to frequently mismatched delivery orders. As there were no automated integration between orders & fulfillments, the process required manual steps such as address input, printing and assignment of logistic packing slips.
Inaccurate outdated sales data. Frequent mismatches between finance reporting vs. actual physical plus online sales. Often resulting in manual reconciliations or adjustments.
Inflexible product management. Unable to support flexible pricing for regional sales due to lack of multi-currency support. Unable to bundle products for specialized promo campaigns.
Manual inventory management. POS sales data from physical retail locations and replenishment operations data (from distribution hub to retail locations) are still manually summarized and uploaded. Requires a lot of manual work, large room for synchronization errors.

Various software was used in the other areas of the business. Irvins was using SAP for finance & accounting. Octopus for their POS (point-of-sales) system. Poket for customer loyalty program called . Payment providers were Stripe. Delivery logistics with DHL.

Their top objectives were:

Migrate majority of workloads onto Shopify
Enable support for international sales on multiple sites
Minimize overall ongoing cost structure (cost efficiency)
Build business intelligence capabilities (i.e. a data warehouse for business analysts)

We have also identified the following business requirements:

Enable local customers to do self-pickup with online purchases
Upgrade realtime synchronization between all POS with ERP
System integration with 3rd party logistics (DHL)
Business integration with finance & accounting (SAP)

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Solutions & Outcomes

In 2019, Delos was selected by Irvins to be their digital transformation partner. Our highest priority is on collaborative problem-solving and to help Irvins move towards their desired goals and outcomes.

Next, after analyzing the challenges they faced, we propose a strategy to design the new system and application to be integration friendly as possible. This means the system can be integrated on multiple areas for both present and future use cases.

Seamless integration allows for business processes to flow more reliably (requiring human intervention increases risk of disruption) and automatically (lower costs in the long run). Delos doesn’t recommend rebuilding existing software which already running and working well for the business. Typically, it’s less costly and disruptive to take out the dysfunctional pieces and then replace with better components.

Shopify was selected to be the solution to replace their existing custom e-commerce site because of its overwhelming benefits as an e-commerce solution. Multiple core modules are instantly available out of the box, reducing the need for software development time. Also, Irvins needs on continuous site maintenance and customization are much easier to solve due to the platform’s advanced maturity.

Using Shopify, several integration work can be bypassed as existing supported plug-ins already enables direct integration with global payment provider (Stripe). Giving us instant access to international sales payment.

Irvins has determined a system overhaul is required so we helped designed and built a new enterprise core system to support their growth needs. In addition, a back office web app used by internal teams was also designed & built by Delos.

Our work includes:

Any Irvins customer can login & order from any stores from any region (physical or online) and track their orders with ease. Only possible via various system integrations between multiple online commerce sites (Shopify), retail POS (Octopus), logistics (DHL).
Shopify does provide its own admin dashboard. However, a lot of Irvins business use case heavily relies on their retail physical stores, Delos built a custom web-based application for Irvins staff members in the following teams: Customer Operations, Order & Fulfillment, Finance & Accounting.
Inventory management for all retail locations and their central manufacturing & distribution hub. Integration with existing POS system. No more manual daily uploads.
Automatic integrated inventory between offline and online channels. Able to support & enable automated offline pickups: allow customers to pickup online orders from nearest retail location.
Automatic order management including invoicing & billing, allows large-volume enterprise sales. Seamless migration of all customers and their billing & shipping addresses from old to new core system.
Automatic fulfillment & logistics management. System integration with 3rd party logistics such as DHL enables end-to-end order tracking for international customers. Our system supports their daily in-house logistic operations for domestic orders as well.
Automatic generated formatted CSV reports for finance & accounting to upload onto SAP software.

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