Case Study: OnAir Australia

As SOS Inventory broadens its global footprint, we talk to Paul Dengate, MD and founder of OnAir Solutions, a distributor of technology and solutions to the Australian broadcast, web streaming and audio-visual markets.

Founded in 2000, OnAir was successful and a longstanding user of QuickBooks Desktop; however, during 2020, it became apparent that a better inventory control solution was required to underpin the business going forward.

Paul Dengate, MD takes up the story, “With only a month to go to our financial year end (July 2020), I decided we really couldn’t go into another year without better systems, so at the start of June I started a search, with view to selecting buying and implementing an inventory system in one month! SOS isn’t widely known in Australia, and I looked at several systems (including NetSuite – very expensive!)  before I came across SOS via an internet search. I was impressed that the system offered a two-way integration with QuickBooks Online; enter the data once and both systems are updated. Most inventory systems only offer one-way integration into QuickBooks Online, which is very limiting.”

How about the challenging implementation timescale?

“We are a tech company, and we are thus quite good with systems. SOS is very intuitive and easy to use, and with use of the online help facilities, and the odd call to the amazing SOS support desk, we achieved our aim. We were up and running I just three weeks – having never seen the software before! Whilst I am proud of my people for achieving this, it is also a great testament for SOS as a product and a company.”

Whilst the USA and Europe are in the grip of Covid chaos and lock downs, Australia seems to be one of the few countries in the world to have cracked the problem, with very few cases now being reported. We wondered if Covid had made an impact on Paul’s business.

“In mid-2020, Australia simply shut down as a country. No-one could fly in or out. And that stopped the disease in its tracks. Today we still have significant travel restrictions, but businesses are now functioning again. And, yes, it did have an impact on my business as suddenly, everyone wanted buy AV and streaming technology to help them manage the crisis, and this led to a twenty-fold increase in our online orders. Under the old system, we had to key each online order manually into QuickBooks Desktop and that would have killed us. With our new QuickBooks Online/SOS Inventory solution, we have all the e-commerce interfaces so online orders are received directly into SOS and QuickBooks Online, no re-keying, no data errors.”

We asked Paul what in the SOS solution has made a material difference to his business.

“Serial number tracking has been a great asset to us. Prior to SOS, we managed the serial numbers in four different spreadsheets which is a challenge. Now it is a by-product of having an integrated system. It makes our lives so much easier.”

And we asked what’s next for the implementation?

“We are experimenting with bin tracking, and we would like to understand a bit more about sharing reports. Apart from that we’re good!

“That in itself is amazing,” concluded Paul. “We have implemented a new ERP system just a few short months ago, and we are perfectly happy apart from one or two bits with reporting that we are still learning about. That is quite a testament to SOS Inventory. You hear so many ERP horror stories and or experience of implementing and using SOS has just been a delight!”