A Scottish fintech firm’s “breakthrough” tool that automates the transfer of data between systems has saved its clients 75,000 hours of time in its first full year.
Leading provider of cloud technology Eureka Solutions sees “global potential” for its cloud-based integration software after delivering “huge productivity benefits” to customers in the ecommerce sector.
The East Kilbride firm’s Cloud Data Exchange (CDE) tool enables separate systems to “talk” to each other, and latest estimates show that in 2021 it saved each of its customers an average of 630 hours in lost productivity.
Gillian Livingstone, chief operating officer at Eureka Solutions, said: “Time is the one thing that all of our clients wish they had more of – and we are giving them it.
“When it comes to ecommerce businesses, the efficiencies delivered by CDE speak for themselves. During 2021 the software handled almost 13 million transactions, saving around 75,000 hours that would have been needed to input that data manually.
“Our clients are freed up from error-prone processes that soak up staff time, which means their people can focus on being more productive, efficient and solving issues for their customers. Instant access to accurate business data at any time means they see other benefits, from faster order fulfilment to better stock management.”
CDE works for any size of business, whether a one-person operation needing data transferred once a week, or bigger firms needing data updated every 30 seconds. It’s customisable and requires no specialist coding knowledge.
Operational for several years, and based on the principles of the firm’s popular ‘Data Exchange’ solution, the upgraded ‘cloud’ product was officially taken to market last January and the figures for the 12 months since then have exceeded the firm’s targets.
During 2021 it handled 12.9m transactions that otherwise would have required human intervention.
With 119 clients, CDE’s busiest month was November 2021 when it handled 1.6m transactions, as online retailers dealt with the rush of Black Friday and Christmas shoppers.
Now the firm expects to benefit from the ongoing pandemic-driven move to ecommerce, with countless new businesses springing up, while traditional retailers accelerate the move online.
Livingstone added: “This is an important time for us. Many of those new and developing ecommerce businesses are going to find that the data black hole between different systems is a blight that will stifle their growth. We are the answer to those problems.”
Typically, online businesses are built on ecommerce platforms, including Magento by Adobe, Shopify and WooCommerce. Retailers hit problems because the website software does not integrate with accounting packages like Sage or Xero, or with business management software like Salesforce.
Lara Fitches, sales manager, CDE, said: “Pretty much every business will use a well-known accounting software package, but they simply don’t speak to the ecommerce platforms. That means that every time a customer places an order online, a member of staff will have to sit and manually type that information into their book-keeping or accountancy software.
“That may involve inputting the customer’s name, address and order details, with a major risk of simple human error getting into the system. Then someone also needs to manually adjust stock levels and upload them back to the website. If they are doing that 20 to 100 times a day it is a full-time job for someone. CDE makes all of this happen automatically.
“We have clients selling specialist products online and they may only get five orders a day. Yet it simply isn’t worth their time doing it manually because it keeps them away from making and shipping the products they are passionate about. Then we have the more mass-market clients selling thousands of items each day, where the benefits of automation simply can’t be contested.”
Fitches added: “We are working on the product every single day. If a customer requests a new feature, we deliver that wherever possible. We are getting asked for new connectors every day, building out the portfolio of systems we can help clients integrate with.”