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by David Longworth - Thursday, 6th September 2007

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You may not have heard of Gopak, but you will have seen our folding tables. They’ve appeared in Doctor Who and the most recent Harry Potter film.

We’re Britain’s biggest manufacturer of aluminium folding tables. They’re all still made in Hythe in Kent. We’re very proud of that.

Gopak – which is privately owned, and dates back to 1954 – has diversified over the past ten years. Before then we only had one product.

Now we have a full range, and we’ve introduced complementary products, sourced from partners. We’ve been looking to our IT to improve communications internally and with customers.

Our strategy is to get maximum exposure by appearing in other people’s catalogues and selling direct through our own catalogue and website.

But the software we were using wasn’t able to keep a record of everything that was going on with customers – enquiries, meetings, ongoing service issues, details of orders placed and any credit-control conversations.

The system, from Chairman Software, is for the furniture industry. It’s good at dealing with our bills of material and managing production, but it’s not designed to handle customer service.

Chairman has all our sales data dating back seven years, so we wanted something that could bolt onto it.

We chose a customer relationship management package called SalesLogix, developed by Sage, and supplied through its partner, Pythagoras.

My goal was to have SalesLogix as the main screen everyone would use for sales, service and telemarketing. Then, once they’d put an order in, the Chairman system would handle all the order processing, manufacturing and distribution.

The link had to be slick since when someone calls, we put in the order while they’re on the phone.

By connecting the two systems, we can track service issues and report problems back to manufacturing. In telemarketing, too, we have good visibility – we can monitor which leads come in each week.

When people make an enquiry, the system automatically sends out a catalogue and schedules a follow-up call.

So we always know where the customer is in the sales cycle. If they say they have planning permission, and plan to build a year from now, we schedule a follow-up call in the diary.

As well as our eight office-based sales admin staff, our three sales managers on the road also need to see account details.

I didn’t want them to have to work offline then try to synchronise their laptops with the main system. They connect directly to the central database, meaning everyone who logs on as a remote user can see what we see.

Now everyone has all the information they need when they’re talking to customers. We also allow customers to track the status of their orders online with a link to TNT for consignment.

Creating the link between SalesLogix and Chairman was a challenge. We invited representatives from both firms to our offices and told them what we wanted.

The engineers came up with a fix. There was a long and frustrating period of development but we could always see progress.

We also put the software through its paces with lots of independent tests. I wanted to know that we had nailed all the problems, so that the launch would run smoothly.

Some people took longer than others to get used to the new process but it wasn’t because they found problems with the product – it was just a case of adapting to a new system.

The next step is to integrate our website, so any orders placed online go straight to Chairman and the account details are passed to SalesLogix.

That will be another six months in development but it will improve our efficiency because staff won’t have to open accounts and put an order in, just approve what’s been entered.

When I started this project, I drew up a flow chart of what I wanted to achieve. It showed how I wanted orders to work. I revisited that chart six months after go-live and we had achieved every one of our objectives.

Tags: telemarketing, sales data, database, chairman software, order processing, software, customer relationship management, integration, technology in business,