Sterland Framework Software System

How did Sterland come about?

Almost half a century ago, the founder of Sterland Brothers Timber Supplies envisioned a management system that worked seamlessly with his timber, plumbing and building supplies business, but no such system existed. To meet his needs, he built a solution that catered to the specific needs of these industries. This system is a fully integrated business management software solution that

• improves productivity
• saves money
• minimises error
• allows a business to grow online
• gives better customer service

The success of this system in the industry resulted in the development of a new company, Sterland Computing, to formally sell the STIX enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, originally known as ‘ProStix’. This first iteration was improved with the integration of cloud-based capabilities, and has now evolved to ‘Frameworks’.

Nowadays, Sterland has become a leading software, business services, and outsourcing solutions provider with over 4,700 users across 500 sites and 100 organisations in the timber, plumbing and building supplies industries throughout Australia and New Zealand. Due to their modernised system, the company has even partnered with big names including MITRE 10, Plumbtec, and HBT.

What is Sterland?

Sterland’s flagship product is the cloud-based Open Edge Frameworks software system. It is essentially a feature-rich suite of products that allows companies to run an entire business from a single application.

This all-encompassing system with the ability to manage a range of different business activities including

• sales functionality
• managing POS
• inventory & margin management
• financial management
• enquiry functions
• supporting software requirements
• e-commerce

Features of Sterland

Strong Inventory Management

Businesses face a whole host of inventory issues with shrinkage being a big one – 36.5% of inventory shrinkage is due to shoplifting and a shocking 30% attributed to employee theft. To combat this, Frameworks possesses strong inventory management tracking capabilities for tighter stock control to minimise understocking, overstocking, and theft.

As a fully integrated system, there is seamless coordination between different business activities. A multi-channel sales feature ensures better monitoring and coordinating of product catalogues, ecommerce functionality, inventory tracking, and cross-selling capabilities.

The system can also automate various functions such as

• inventory tracking
• price and discount management
• stock level monitoring

Hence, if a product, for example, has fallen below a predetermined stock level, users are automatically notified to reorder the product.

Quality CRM

In business, there’s a rule of thumb: 80% of your business’s revenue comes from 20% of your customer base. Retaining long-lasting relationships with customers is crucial to business stability and growth. As a result, Frameworks ensures that users have access to strong CRM capabilities in

• storing detailed customer information
• providing the capabilities to answer customer enquiries efficiently
• better aligning product supply with customer demands

This is achieved through coordination between the inventory management function and CRM function. For example, if a customer had an enquiry about whether the business had an item of stock, users could easily search it up through Frameworks and identify whether they have the stock, and where.

Add-On Modules

Frameworks is modular, enabling Sterland to easily modify the system to respond to market changes and customer needs, and apply innovations easily. For example, if a customer has unique user interface (UI) requirements for their system, Sterland can build on existing IP to customise an old module, rather than starting from scratch – no need to reinvent the wheel for each project.

Sterland also offers a range of optional add-on modules for installation. For example, Sterland recognises more and more businesses are going online to sell their products to increase their reach. Hence, businesses can opt-in to an ecommerce module so that they can trade electronically with suppliers and customers.

Mobile considerations

Understanding the importance in capitalising on the window of opportunity with in-store customers, Sterland have developed mobile app software that ties in with the existing Sterland Framework. Mobile apps customisations such as the SalesRep Assistant provide users with access to customer details & transactions. Another app, the PDA add-on allows workers to process purchase orders, run stock receipting, and conduct stocktake more efficiently. There’s also greater accuracy as users don’t have to transfer the data or manually input data into the Frameworks system, as the Frameworks PDA is integrated with Frameworks.

Why go with Sterland?

Strong Industry Expertise

With almost a century worth of knowledge in the industry, Sterland is well aware of the intricate software needs of businesses in timber, plumbing and building supplies. Inventory management for these businesses are often more complicated, with complex product catalogues and unique SKUs for product combinations. Sterland accounts for this and is built to ensure the system can handle these complexities.

Easily accessible

Using a cloud-based software has enabled Sterland to provide it’s solutions anywhere, anytime, and over multiple branches to businesses, as many businesses have not one, but several warehouses and stores to coordinate activities between. Not only is using a cloud system more productive, Ramco has also found that 82% of companies they surveyed managed to save money by relying on cloud systems.

Improving Efficiency and Reducing Errors

As Frameworks is a complete ERP solution which utilizes real data, it effectively brings together various business activities. For example, customer enquiries are answered with data from inventory management, and purchasing orders can be completed through automated stock monitoring and inventory management measures.

With the data all within one system, users can bypass looking things up in various systems, improving efficiency. This also reduces the chance of errors as there’s no need to re-input any data into another system. This is a real benefit as a Bloomberg BNA study revealed that around 27.5% of accounting errors are attributed to manual entry errors. With an improvement in accuracy, users are able to gain more accurate insights, and make better informed decisions.

Who is Sterland Ideal for:

Sterland’s solutions are most suitable for timber, plumbing and building supplies businesses as it was intentionally developed for these industries. Through continual development, Sterland has been able to provide users with the ability to use their systems anywhere, anytime and on any device, making the task of managing, monitoring, and analysing a range of businesses activities much more convenient.

Sterland aims to offer the total ERP solution for users so that they only need one system to manage all business activities including POS, inventory management, CRM, and supplier management.With a variety of add-ons and extra mobility through mobile apps, the system is a good base and can also be tailored to grow with the business.

How Can We Help With Your Sterland Integration

With an experienced developer, there are a myriad of ways to integrate Sterland into your business operations and let it streamline any inefficient processes you have become tired of dealing with.

Being specialists in web and with a heart to help and share, our web developers are well-versed in these matters to lend a hand. just give us a call today on 9912 6403 and let us know how we can help or answer your questions.