MINISO adds a layer of convenience and control to ordering

Mia, an operations assistant, oversees activity both at the store level and the corporate office — and approves every product that every person at MINISO orders.

The problem

Manual invoice processing: Manually collected and shared with accounting

Slow purchasing process: Logging into multiple vendor portals to place orders

Late orders: Orders arrive late due to unnecessary back-and-forth communication

Operationally, MINISO consulted a spreadsheet listing vendors and corresponding logins. Mia and colleagues would ask the departments for purchasing recommendations, then fulfill those requests one at a time across MINISO’s multiple accounts with multiple vendors.

To provide payables with the info they needed, Mia and colleagues “would collect invoices and hand them over to accounting. If they noticed multiple invoices, or missing ones, then we’d have to fish through emails and different accounts. It was very frustrating.”

The solution

MINISO partnered with Order.co in April of 2019 to establish a reliable procure-to-pay partnership and to create sustainable systems for their employees.

Implementing Order.co, end users were given direct access to what they needed — namely, a catalog to order from — and approvers could quickly approve those orders.

The outcome

Consolidated invoicing

Pre-Order.co, spend visibility was less than clear, as budgets were tricky to set and difficult to enforce. “Accounting would ask how much a department had spent, and we didn’t have an answer.”

Order.co’s tools and easy-to-use platform changed that. “Now we have a budget for each store that we can see right away, and that shows where each store is." In Mia’s words, “now I can control budget.”

Happy users

Because Order.co is so easy to use, it has reduced unneeded back-and-forth processes. “No stores have problems ordering anymore,” explains Mia, “and that has made the process a lot easier.”

In addition, the streamlined process, Order.co’s super-charged vendor relationships, and improved tracking resulted in a vast improvement in timely ordering and delivery: "It allows our stores to receive their orders on time," recounts Mia. The result for Mia and her team was smarter spending.