OrderEZ Secures Seed Funding To Develop Business Further
OrderEZ is a business management platform that has recently announced them receiving over S$500,000 in seed funding, which will help them develop their business to Australia, New Zealand and beyond. We speak to both Andrew Creswick, Co-founder, OrderEZ and Jeffrey Meese, Co-founder, OrderEZ, and discuss what this new development means for the business and what the future holds for them.
Tell us a little about OrderEZ and what it does.
We love the food and beverage industry. Eating and drinking well is very important to the two of us and we saw too many bars, restaurants, brands, and suppliers fail not because they didn’t make good food, have an interesting concept, produce good wine, or distill delicious whiskey but because they didn’t have enough information about their business to inform their decision making.
We experienced this first-hand and, when searching for digital solutions to support our own distribution business, found that most were too complex, too expensive, or didn't holistically address the F&B sector’s needs. We were inspired to create our own solution and soon realised we could help plug these gaps for other businesses by offering our platform as a service that simplified and streamlined critical processes at an affordable subscription rate.
Simply put, OrderEZ is an end-to-end business management platform for F&B suppliers and venues that uses real-time data and seamless integrations to help them digitalise supply chain processes, centralise business management and generate more revenue. It was founded to help deliver better information to business owners; If you’re a supplier that means knowing who your best customers are, how to price your products, and manage your sales team. If you’re a venue it means knowing your cost of goods sold, managing your suppliers, and operating as efficiently as possible.
What are some of the challenges that the F&B sector faces that OrderEZ is attempting to correct or ease?
In our combined 20 years of industry experience, we observed firsthand that many F&B businesses still use manual processes that take up more time, energy and money than they have to spare. This can range from the tedious process of communicating sales orders via WhatsApp to manually entering invoice details and tracking finances on Excel sheets on a daily basis.
We also noticed that as an industry that relies heavily on in-person interactions, there is a lack of transparency and real-time insights, leading businesses to spend more money adopting multiple software to manage different sales and order processes.
OrderEZ addresses these pain points by providing:
A simple and scalable business management platform - OrderEZ taps on real-time data and platform integrations to help digitise F&B business processes—from sales management to order fulfillment and accounting—on one centralised platform. The platform is simple, agile and scalable, making it robust enough to be a stand-alone business management platform yet flexible enough to be added on to existing ERP systems.
An integrated sales enablement software - Instead of purchasing separate CRM software, OrderEZ lets businesses open accounts, record sales activities and track deal pipelines seamlessly on the same platform. It also offers real-time and cumulative insights that salespersons can use to pitch with authority and improve relationships with both clients and brand owners.
A customised solution at the fraction of the cost - Our platform is built while keeping the F&B industry front of mind and uses a mobile-first approach for everything from recording sales activities to digitising order fulfillment, invoicing and an in-built driver app for tracking deliveries. OrderEZ offers all this and more at a fraction of what less customised solutions in the market would charge.
What does the recent seed funding mean for OrderEZ and for future expansion to countries like Australia and New Zealand?
Our immediate objective following the funding is to consolidate our operations in Singapore and expand into Australia and New Zealand, with the goal of growing our user base by 10x by year end. Australia and New Zealand are exciting markets that will give us access to an amazing range of independent F&B suppliers and producers, many of whom are self distributing. There are thousands of coffee roasters, craft brewers, distillers, bakers, and wineries who we think could use our help to save hundreds of hours of data entry, improve efficiency and transparency, and most importantly--sell more.
The seed funding will also help us to introduce more useful functions to the platform – such as a Lite and Pro version that would allow businesses to opt in and subscribe to different functionalities based on their needs and spending power. We are also working on an enterprise offering in response to demand from our client base.
Why do you think digital platforms like OrderEZ will become the future of the F&B Scene? Do you believe it’s become even more pertinent after the impact of COVID-19?
We believe that OrderEZ is a trailblazer on the F&B scene because we not only help businesses save time, but sell more. This is imperative as F&B suppliers and venues compete in an industry that has thin margins – even a 2 or 3% improvement in sales could make or break the business. This has only been heightened in light of the global pandemic, driving more businesses to seek digital solutions to gain a competitive edge.
A lot of the relationships between businesses in the past is built on personal relationships and solidifying ties in face to face meetings. Do you think platforms like OrderEZ that concentrate on digital solutions would weaken or reduce the importance of those ties?
OrderEZ was made for the F&B industry by F&B distribution experts. We understand that the F&B industry will always rely on in-person interactions, and while we’re here to minimise as many inefficiencies in these processes as we can, we built OrderEZ to be a platform that can not only complement but strengthen important relationships and ties.
For example, consolidating data of suppliers and buyers on our platform makes it easier for those involved to reach out and get in touch with anyone they might have established a strong relationship with, or have fallen out of touch with in recent weeks and months. This ensures that these fostered relationships are always accounted for, and don’t have the opportunity to fall through the cracks.
Additionally, our mobile-first and real-time interface makes it easy for salespersons to not only key-in sales activities on the go, but pull out key data points that can help inform their sales pitches and add value to both clients and brand owners.
Andrew Creswick (Left) with business partner Jeffrey Meese
Where do you see OrderEZ in the next few years?
As F&B businesses begin to recover from the impact of the pandemic in the next few years, the appetite for digital solutions is likely to increase. We believe that countless F&B operations will be transitioning out of legacy software and looking for fresh solutions. At this crucial time, we want the industry to know that a software upgrade can deliver not just time savings, but a tangible increase in sales if you choose a tool like ours.
There is a lot of opportunity for OrderEZ to bridge the existing gap for affordable and simple business management platforms that cater holistically to F&B suppliers and venues. We are confident that our solution will help solve real problems in the industry and with its low barriers of entry, become a go-to solution in the years to come.
