Genesis Today, headquartered in Austin, Texas, manufactures a variety of natural health supplements for internal cleansing, internal regeneration and the support of specific conditions such as weight loss, joint health, immune health and healthy sleep patterns.
Established in 2001, the company's current line of products was offered to the retail market after two-and-a-half years of testing. Dr Lindsey Duncan, CEO of Genesis Today, says: "Unlike other nutritional supplement manufacturers, our programmes are not developed in a sales or marketing department, but in well respected and prestigious nutritional clinics. The programme development process is overseen, tested and validated by a group of experts from the medical, naturopathic, nutritional and scientific fields. No copycats with Genesis Today - only products that have an organic reason for being.
"Our goal from the beginning is quite different from most companies. We do not wish to be the biggest supplement company; we desire to be the very best and the most respected and loved by our customers. We view our company more as a healer than a marketer."
'Genesis' means 'birth, beginning, to start anew', and this is just what the company wanted to accomplish when it initiated a search for new enterprise software in 2006. Genesis, which had been using QuickBooks, had grown by 1 030% from 2004 to 2006, becoming the fastest growing company in Austin, according to the Austin Business Journal awards, presented in 2007. Ron Tennell, Genesis Today CFO, attributes this phenomenal growth to "the purity of our products and the complete control from farm to shelf. Also, our online consumer 'Ask Dr Lindsey' Web site provides questionnaires that are analysed by our own in-house staff, providing pull-through of product from the retail establishments."
Genesis distributes approximately 150 different Stock-Keeping Units (SKUs) of nutritional products in the form of liquids, powders and capsules to distributors and retail establishments throughout the US, Canada and Korea. Products are marketed locally and regionally via demos, co-op advertising and on-site seminars supported by the company's in-house sales staff and external sales representatives. While products are marketed on a national level via magazine, radio, trade shows and promotional materials within each order, distributors are used primarily for international sales. Genesis currently uses approximately six primary manufacturing facilities and three different warehouse locations throughout the US to fill approximately 4 000 orders a month from 3 700 customers, excluding direct sales to individuals.
"Our growth clearly required a new software system that enables us to track the status of an order from booking through to invoicing, while handling a great deal of line item data," says Tennell. After inputting the company's requirements to an online service that analyses available software packages, he was presented with six alternatives, all of which were investigated. SYSPRO was the winner based on: competitive price; multiple modules that could be added as needed; reputation for problem-free upgrades. Genesis went for a 24-user SYSPRO ERP licence. Today, SYSPRO runs on eight CPUs on top of Windows 2003 R2 SP2.
After implementation of the SYSPRO software by SYSPRO reseller CSI Technologies, Genesis realised the wisdom of its selection. Just as Genesis Today was formed to 'truly make a difference in people's lives', SYSPRO, it seems, has truly made a difference at Genesis.
The company now has the ability to monitor the volume of orders going through the system, allowing management to perform staff distribution correctly, project monthly revenue based on bookings, monitor back-order situations and do daily comparisons of salesperson goals versus actual accomplishments.
"The query functions within SYSPRO allow for the creation of just about any report imaginable, enabling us to provide the sales department with information relating to various markets and customer base inquiries, not to mention the support of other departments and the creation of reports when our annual audit rolls around," says Tennell.
He concludes: "It is very difficult to put a cost savings number to what SYSPRO has meant to our company as we simply would not have survived the growth pressures put on our infrastructure without it. We would have cratered long ago! For a lower to middle cost software, the power and effectiveness generated has been most rewarding. Our challenge is that we are only using 50% of the software's potential." When asked to quantify Genesis Today's return on investment since implementing SYSPRO, Tennell replies: "This is always a tough one as it is difficult to measure a real bottom-line impact of an item that supports your entire infrastructure. All I can say is that for the two years we have been running SYSPRO, we have experienced a net income of 2 200% of the cost of the software and licences."
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