Nagane: Thank you for joining us today. We understand that since founding nomad's, you have been importing toys and wholesaling them in Japan, and that you are also planning to open a physical store next year.
You have been growing quickly, so could you explain again what made inventory management, purchasing, and billing painful enough to start looking at a tool like Sanka?
Nagasawa: At first, we managed everything in Excel. We still use it for some tasks, but human error was a constant problem. At the end of our July fiscal close, our inventory value did not match and it created a lot of work. We felt that if we had a proper system, we could avoid those mistakes and report inventory values to our accountant much faster, which would also reduce labor costs.
Nagane: What was driving those errors in practice?
Nagasawa: Mostly data-entry mistakes. The person handling the work before entered everything manually, so errors were hard to avoid. We also had two warehouses, one internal and one outsourced, and we could not see the external warehouse status in real time.
Nagane: That is a difficult setup. When you decided to introduce Sanka, what became the deciding factor compared with other tools?
Saiga: Because we had been managing inventory in Excel, ease of use mattered most. Sanka's screens are very easy to understand and intuitive to operate. Multiple members can manage the work at the same time, and that directly improves efficiency.
Nagane: Ease of use matters. Was there anything else that made the difference?
Saiga: We were attracted by the fact that Sanka does more than inventory control. It can manage purchasing, billing, orders, and shipping in one place. Many tools focus only on inventory, but Sanka also supports the upstream and downstream work, such as creating purchase orders and handling sales orders, so we felt we could manage everything together.
Nagane: Thank you. We will keep improving based on customer feedback. As you moved forward with the rollout, were there any parts that felt difficult?
Saiga: At the beginning, bulk registration of inventory took some effort, but support helped us solve it. Right now, we are still shaping the product master and the billing workflow. Another challenge is that order formats differ by customer, so we want to make that process more efficient.
Nagane: Standardizing incoming order data is definitely a major theme. For example, we can provide a dedicated form for trading partners to fill in, then import it automatically as order data. If that can flow directly into purchasing, the process becomes even more efficient. We would like to propose that kind of workflow as the rollout continues.
Nagasawa: That makes sense. The response will vary by trading partner, so it is still unclear how much we can standardize. We plan to start by importing the current data into Sanka as CSV and then improve step by step.
Nagane: That is a practical direction. Sanka makes it easy to import CSV data, and once the format becomes more standardized, operations should run even more smoothly. We can keep improving the process while taking each partner relationship into account.
Nagasawa: Understood. We look forward to continuing the rollout together.
Nagane: Thank you. Let us keep improving the back office operations together.