The Company

In the spring of 2017, a few barbecue lovers from Saskatchewan, Canada got together to discuss concerns about the future of the barbecue industry. Through extensive research and a lot of discussion, they found that the wood pellet industry was not satisfying the needs of the customer—that's how the Lumber Jack Distributor Canada was conceived.

Lumber Jack Distributor Canada is a wholesaler of wood barbecuing pellets. They serve the Canadian market with the industry's best BBQ pellets. They deal in:

• Barbecues
• Smokers
• Grills
• Wood pellets
• BBQ sauce, BBQ rubs, and hot sauce
• BBQ tools and accessories
• Outdoor patio heaters and more.

The Challenge

Prior to starting Lumber Jack Distributor Canada, Dylan Cooke had experience working with other software applications like SAP, and Freshbooks along with regular excel sheets which he believed were less integrated and old school in terms of their user interface.
" I have worked with SAP and found it complicated and very cumbersome to use, We also tried using Freshbooks. However, it was not meeting many of our requirements." says Mr. Dylan Cooke.

The Solution

Dylan and his team knew they wanted a cloud-based application when they first started in 2017. For their invoicing requirements, they began using Zoho Invoice and later upgraded to Zoho Books for bookkeeping. They promptly signed up for Zoho Inventory after realizing their need for an inventory management solution and reduce the hassle on their day to day stock keeping requirements.

Mr. Dylan Cooke says, " It was not a case where we struggled with something else and switched over to Zoho Inventory. It was that we needed something and started with Zoho Inventory and stuck with it ever since This is a testament to the quality of the product because we have not wanted to look anywhere else since we started using it We stayed with Inventory and we are growing with it. "

The benefits

Lumber Jack Distributor Canada uses multiple warehouses, making order tracking difficult. They created customized roles specific to some modules to try to streamline order management a little more.
Dylan remarks " We can pick the tracking number and the tracking link from the Zoho Inventory shipment module which is very handy as we were used to doing this manually from the waybill. The Kanban view on the packages module is really handy, too, as you can see the status of everything at a glance. Zoho Inventory has helped improve our overall order management process. "

Customization to the rescue

The ability to create custom workflows in Zoho Inventory has enormously benefitted Dylan and his team

Mr. Dylan Cooke says, " Recently, we needed a custom function for weight calculation. We are very conscious of the weight and dimension, it should be accurate as it affects our shipping cost. We were manually calculating the weight for every order, which takes a huge amount of time. The custom function essentially adds up all the weight of the items in the order and puts them in the custom field. That saved us a lot of time in our order management process. It probably saved us 10 hours a week. "
Dylan also pointed out how helpful the support team has been throughout the company's journey helping him with his queries in minutes.
" I think the support team is great; I have not had any issues. They are very responsive. That's another reason we love dealing with Zoho because the support is fantastic. You get a response within a minute, if not, they will get back to you right away. I never had an instance where I reached out to Zoho and they never got back to me—they always get back to me. I usually chat with the same people, too. "

What's ahead for Lumber Jack Distributor Canada?

Dylan says they are planning to build an online store with Zoho Commerce so their customers can directly place their orders on their online store. Dylan and his team are strong advocates of Zoho as a business software. He has also recommended Zoho to several friends and fellow business owners.
" When we deal with other business associates, and they ask what we use for inventory tracking, we are always keen to talk about Zoho; we feel we have made the right decision. "