How Stoddart Revolutionized Their Operations with Tech

Founded in 1959 by two brothers from Newcastle in England, Stoddart came from simple beginnings in metal fabrication to build several product divisions including food service equipment, commercial kitchen contracting, stainless steel plumbing products and more. With growth and diversity comes complexity, but the company has mastered this challenge by creating a unified customer commerce solution integrated into the Salesforce platform, ensuring a single source of truth in their data. Now, imagine managing multiple product divisions, each with thousands of products, without ever facing data integration issues or losing crucial customer information. Stoddart has achieved this, effectively taming the eCommerce beast and reclaiming control of their online data, enabling them to drive growth effortlessly.

A Legacy of Expansion: From Founders to the Third Generation

Now led by the 3rd Generation of the family, Stoddart has manufacturing in Brisbane with warehouse and distribution spaces in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Auckland as well as representation in Adelaide. The company employs 425 people nationwide, including 24 apprentices across a variety of trades. When Tom and Albert began their venture seven decades ago, they could not have imagined the company as it is today. The company has moved on from simple beginnings as a metal fabrication company and now has several specialist product divisions. These include food service equipment, commercial kitchen contracting, stainless steel plumbing products, architectural metalwork contracting, street furniture and contract metal fabrication.

Leveraging Digital Capacity for Future Growth

Over the decades Stoddart has built a significant footprint in the physical world. However, it is in the online world where they see a lot of exciting opportunities for the business in the near future.
Being a family-owned business, we aim to control our own destiny. We find value in being self-sufficient and prefer not to depend on consulting services. I often say that our work is only complicated because we do so many different things. We operate in many sales channels, each with unique customers who have different expectations says Shane Slaughter, ICT Manager for the business

Salesforce and StoreConnect D2C: A Game Changer

Shane and his team were advancing with their Salesforce integration and appreciated that StoreConnect was platform-first, making the vision of a unified data hub a reality. We were looking to increase data integrity and remove additional sources of information and it made sense to have a Salesforce native eCommerce platform after moving onto the Salesforce CRM. With multiple stores and products we can use the same product on different sites, and with a wide range of products, there are site features we can make good use of to simplify our work. Don't understate the value of integration, Shane offers as advice to companies looking at these options. Shane also liked that StoreConnect offered a great value proposition in price unlike some of the alternatives available.

“We chose StoreConnect for its integration with Salesforce and its affordability”

Eliminating Double Work

Shane explained the time-saving value of being able to eliminate the double work and errors that comes from having to manage data entry into disparate systems: Prior to using StoreConnect and Salesforce with our previous website, we had to double enter all of the data between both systems around products.”
With that came a lot of orphan records and when we dug under the covers, you could see that there was quite a number of disparate parts on both sides of the systems where somebody thought it was a good idea to enter a product on the website, which didn’t match what was in our ERP and vice versa.

Preparing for Continued Growth and Innovation

With such a diverse product range, Stoddart is well-placed to grow. Even when tough times can hit one or more market segments within the business, the divisions can carry the business forward. Diversity reduces risk.
Stoddart has a completely different dynamic to many other companies which you find as you talk to the people driving the business. You always know where you stand. It is multi-generational and the future is exciting.
Whilst manufacturing isn't the powerhouse of the Australian economy it once was, Stoddart has proven that local manufacturing and the employment it brings, are not only possible, but profitable. Particularly when using technology to increase efficiencies in operations.

StoreConnect's Role in Stoddart's Ongoing Success

Shane says, The complexity in what we do is linked to the diversity of our customers because there are so many different verticals that we sell across.

Each customer is unique. A plumbing product being sold through a channel is completely different to the way that we sell a food service product into a mom and dad's fish and chip shop.

Certain products lend itself to true more traditional e-commerce of direct selling without any changes. In contrast, some products need to be configured-to-order where it needs to be dealt with in an expression of interest format.

With StoreConnect we can service the different requirements of our customers, including having a direct to consumer eCommerce store for direct purchase of spare parts, while also maintaining a more traditional B2B online store for more detailed customer requests. All managed out of our Salesforce org.

StoreConnect remains valuable as we transition our spare parts and consumables to make them available for purchase online. We are particularly impressed by its variant and related product features”, Shane concludes.

With a great culture, diverse product range, and a long legacy of seizing opportunities, the team at StoreConnect are excited to play a small part in contributing to the next several decades of prosperity for this iconic Australian business.