How to Automate STORIS

A furniture store sells what it does not yet have

STORIS makes retail software for home furnishings and nothing else, which is why furniture, bedding, appliance and casual retailers run their showrooms, warehouses and books on it.

The unusual thing about this trade is that the sale happens before the goods do. A customer picks a sectional in a fabric the store has never stocked, pays a deposit and goes home. What they bought is now a line on a purchase order to a manufacturer, a slot on a container, a receipt at a distribution centre, and eventually two people carrying it up a staircase. The order can be live for four months.

STORIS holds all of that on one record. Its unified commerce architecture puts point of sale, inventory, purchasing, logistics, customer service and accounting on a single database, so the associate on the floor with STORIS NextGen and the buyer writing the purchase order are reading the same number.

Ten minutes to sell a sectional, ten weeks to deliver it

Selling it took ten minutes. The next ten weeks are the job.

Someone rings the vendor to ask whether the order shipped and gets a voicemail. Someone tells a customer, for the third time, that the piece is still expected in March. Someone calls to book a delivery window, reaches an answering machine, and calls again on Thursday. Someone works out which balances are unpaid before the truck loads, because a driver should not be collecting money on a doorstep.

Then the loose ends the store makes real margin on. A financing approval issued in January that nobody turned into an order. A delivery completed last week with no protection plan on it and no review asked for. A quote written on the floor that went quiet. Every one of those is a call somebody has to remember to make.

STORIS

A ship date that came from the vendor Every open special order checked on the manufacturer's own portal, so a slip from March to May is a call the store makes rather than one it receives.

Approvals before they lapse Financing decisions watched where the lender publishes them, so an approval nobody converted is a conversation while it is still worth having.

The follow-ups a busy floor drops Deliveries with no protection plan, quotes gone quiet and new reviews, gathered nightly with a reply already drafted.

One database ends the retyping, not the phoning

The system-side automation is thorough, and a retailer not using it is paying for the software twice.

Purchase order management builds orders from governed vendor settings and links a purchase order to the specific sales order it is filling, so a special order stays tied to the customer waiting for it. Special order templates by vendor, category, group or SKU prompt the associate for the attributes a frame actually needs, which is why the order comes out right. Replenishment tools watch stock across showrooms, the website and distribution centres, alert buyers to low quantities and time-sensitive backorders, and build a purchase order for review. Electronic data interchange with hundreds of manufacturers confirms receipt of an order, acknowledges cost and quantity and carries shipment notices back. The webhook event hub fires on an order written, a payment received, inventory reserved for fulfilment or a delivery ready for scheduling.

Every one of those events happened inside the store, or with a manufacturer already wired into it.

The vendor too small for EDI has a website and a sales rep instead. So does the freight forwarder holding the container, the finance company that issued the approval, the protection plan administrator and the delivery contractor, and none of them will ever tell an ERP anything.

A delivery date the salesperson can actually promise

The vendor's website already says what a sales rep would tell you, if anybody had the time to ask.

The manufacturer's own order portal read for every open special order, so a sectional that slipped from March to May is a call the store makes on Tuesday rather than one the customer makes in April. Freight tracking checked against what the warehouse is expecting, so receiving is planned around a ship that has actually sailed.

Financing approvals watched where the lender publishes them, so one about to expire becomes a conversation while it is still worth having. Last week's deliveries set against the protection plans attached to them, with the gaps listed and a follow-up drafted. New reviews collected from the sites shoppers read before they visit. Quotes untouched for a week, gathered into one list for the associate who wrote them.

Reading all of that is clerical. Deciding what to tell a customer whose sofa has slipped twice is not, so anything reaching a buyer, a vendor or a customer is drafted and waits for the person who owns the relationship.

Chasing a vendor is not merchandising

That round of websites belongs to nobody in particular, so it happens on the evenings somebody remembers and not on the evenings the floor is busy.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as your office is. It opens STORIS alongside the vendor's portal, the freight tracker, the lender's site or the review pages, reads what each one shows, and puts the answer where your team already looks: a slipped ship date against a customer's order, an approval about to lapse, a delivery with no plan on it.

Driving a browser rather than an API is what reaches the vendor who has never heard of an ERP. It runs on your schedule, limited to the sites you allow, and anything that reaches a customer waits for a person.

The workflows below are already built, and each names the sites it opens.