Nimble Group: Revolutionising the manufacturing industry with a custom ERP built using low-code

Nimble Group's story

Nimble Group, based in China, began as a product development provider for IKEA in 2012, and has since grown to become one of the largest producers, suppliers, agents, and distributors of food contact products, hard goods, and textiles to international retailers.

They currently export goods worth about $100 million USD annually, and have a presence in more than six countries worldwide. Nimble Group is known for providing items that are higher quality, less expensive, safer for consumers, and have a longer shelf life.

Nimble Group offers various vertical services—from product design to manufacturing, packaging, and distribution. They create items from raw materials and tooling to production and distribution by operating in four business segments—manufacturing, production and trading, sourcing, and distribution.

The need

Nimble Group offers a highly diverse product line and business style. They manufacture and trade goods by buying from one supplier and selling to the client, as opposed to sourcing, which involves supplier management rather than the buy-sell model. These three business models are supported by multiple entities and offices worldwide. Furthermore, the thousands of products they have necessitate that they have a complete ERP system to assist them in organizing their business.

What a day at Nimble Group looks like

They have three functions, called The Triangle Team, where one person is the merchant, who deals with the client directly when the client or buyer sends a new request. The merchant's task is to learn the client's specific requirements. After this, the quality engineer will be responsible for checking the product, consolidating the client's requirements, and getting the job done.

QA demonstrates whether the product is feasible, including the material, packaging, and technical aspects. Lastly, they have a supply chain or sourcing person who will work with the direct, domestic, or third-party vendors to source the right product for the customer.

The challenge

• Keeping up with the flow of different projects was hectic.

When new employees join, they also needed to train them in the various tools they use to manage the business, which is time-consuming.

• The quantity of documents to maintain manually became tedious, as they expanded their business.

Their customers wanted to know when their order was shipped and have a more direct relationship with their supplier. But it wasn't feasible for Nimble Group to sort through the different groups or create thousands of folders and subfolders to find the right documents.

The key to all of their problems? Digitising their operations and building a database.

So that's exactly what they did.

They discovered Zoho Creator and built a custom ERP system for their process.

The solution

To handle all aspects of their business, from trading to sourcing, Nimble Group created an ERP system that integrated various modules into a single tool. They use the ERP system for both supplier management and serving their clients.

There are two different directions in which they need to manage these relationships—and both sides require a huge amount of service, which might take months. That's why they wanted this connection to be very transparent.

Their vision is that, for any order, whether it's an incoming order from the client or an incoming and outgoing order placed with a supplier, they'll place both of them on the app built on Zoho Creator and track the order status. They'll then record the manufacturing status in the app, so that both the client and supplier can see it transparently from the system.

With the help of the app, they can also track the financial payment and project status easily for both sides, which can be shown using Creator's customizable dashboard. Their clients can keep track of the order status and how the suppliers are performing, and the suppliers can check to see whether they have enough stock available for the orders placed.

The benefits

• Digitization: With their Zoho Creator app, they're now able to effectively organise the data themselves. So when a user clicks on the product, the life of the product, the status, the supplier, the client, or whatever else is present on the same page is displayed in a single app.

• Smart integrations: The majority of Nimble Group's communication is still handled via email, but they also reach out to leads using LinkedIn. The problem is that they didn't want to lose any communication with their prospects. Now they can record it in CRM, and Zoho will remind them, for example, that they haven't contacted a person for a few days, and then set up a reminder.

• Generating reports: They needed to track performance, products, and forms at different levels, and couldn't afford the time and resources of creating a report by themselves.

• User access control: There are different stakeholders accessing different data using the app. Nimble Group was in need of a system that offered the right role-based or user-controlled access in order to prevent any data privacy issues.

Looking forward