Ollie Pets is an artificial intelligence enabled financial workflow.
A direct-to-consumer pet food retailer supports growth and streamlines financial processes with artificial intelligence technology.
Chain Store Age recently spoke with Kyle Lambert, controller, Ollie Pets, about how the direct-to-consumer pet food brand is leveraging a AI Stampli’s solution to transform its financial operations, achieving results that usually require a much larger team with a dedicated financial staff of three people.
What made Ollie Pets decide to investigate financial AI?
One problem was that we kept running into limitations with our previous accounts payable provider, which we used with our ERP system. Ollie Pets is a fast-growing direct-to-consumer food company, and we had to share our large vendor payments due to our previous settlement which has a hard cap at $999,999.
We would end up sending sellers multiple payments for what should have been one transaction, which was not a very professional look.
The other big pain point was the manual purchase order matching process. Our staff accountant spent hours every day trying to match invoices with purchase orders.
Given the nature of our business, the distribution of human-grade pet food to customers that is made by our co-manufacturing partners in production runs that may vary in quantity, there are always small variations to deal with. We agree with our vendors that an order is considered complete even if there is a variance within an agreed range, typically around 5%, but our old system could not handle that flexibility.
Instead, we would have to manually check everything, calculate unit prices, and get additional approvals even for these expected variations. This led Ollie Pets to look for AI financial solutions.
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How did you choose and implement your financial AI technology?
Financial software vendor Stampli recently provided early access to test its new cognitive AI for PO solution. Instead of only looking for exact matches like most systems, it can really understand when slight differences in quantities or descriptions are good based on our business rules.
We implemented Stampli in June 2024. What really sold us was how the system could handle our specific needs around production variations. Our food vendors generally want quick payment, often within 10 days.
The ability to automatically approve invoices within that 5% variance window without needing another round of approval from our already busy operations team was a major benefit. The fact that we could do everything in one system instead of jumping between multiple platforms was also a big win.