How Techland includes finance in its
customer relationship engine Customer Relationship Marketing - CRM
- the 'one-to-one' model.
Not just business buzzwords, they're the marketing Holy Grail
for the decade. And, according to marketing academics and analysts,
we're all set to spend large sums of money trying to achieve this
goal until well into this Millennium.
The key to this quest is the database or data warehouse – an
invaluable store for customer-centric information. If used
correctly it will allow a business to tailor its offering exactly
to the customer's requirements. This is the concept which has
accounted for a great part of the Techland Group's success.
Techland is one of the UK's leading fax messaging gateway solution
providers, supplying a range of connectivity products: network fax
solutions which integrate with text, voice, email, document
imaging, workflow, unified messaging and data communications
applications to service a market which grew by over 30% last
year.
Today, 64% of world-wide fax traffic is sent directly from the
desktop. However, competition in this area is cut-throat - and he
who stands still, stands to lose millions.
The Techland database system is used to match new products and
services with customer needs. It also provides telesales staff with
rapid access to current stock levels, vital for quoting accurate
availability, pricing and delivery times to customers. This,
however, is not enough to maintain pole-position in the market. Y2K
and euro issues also posed potential problems for Techland, as its
existing systems were not yet prepared for either change.
To more fully exploit the corporate network and enhance
customer service, the company wanted to automate more of the sales
process. Integrating accounting functions with the existing sales
and stock control systems to further automate tasks such as stock
control, invoicing and sales order processing would greatly
increase efficiency, and therefore profitability.
The company embarked upon a three month test and evaluation
pilot of the Exchequer accounting application, from IRIS Enterprise
Software, and subsequently went live with eight modules. Techland
had three distinct goals for a newly integrated accounting
solution: firstly, the software should streamline the sales order
process; secondly, it should improve customer relationship
management and lastly it should give sales staff access to detailed
'live' customer information while on the phone with the
customer.
Techland dealt with the first two goals simultaneously. It
integrated the accounting application with its existing messaging
systems. With its own network fax gateway called
FACSys, Techland fax-enabled Exchequer Enterprise. The
company can now send and receive faxes directly from the accounting
application. This fax-enabled benefit is easily and rapidly
available to any Exchequer Enterprise user.
Purchase orders and invoices are raised automatically. This has
reduced the time spent on administration by 20%. These
documents and others which originate in Exchequer Enterprise can be
faxed directly from the application without any user
intervention. The last goal was achieved through implementing
Exchequer Enterprise Stock Control module. Staff are now able to
access detailed information on previous customer orders by using
the drill-down function. This gives the company a more accurate
picture of customer trends upon which to build future marketing
strategy.
"The Exchequer Enterprise suite has revolutionised the way we
handle customer data," said Nigel Brown, managing director at
Techland Group. "We have instant access to all the sales and
purchase information on the system, which allows us to drill-down
as far as specific serial numbers on a single invoice line. This
information is all stored in an open database, which we can use for
other applications within the organisation, both now and in the
future.
Other timesaving gains were made in the form of seamless
transactions. Techland uses the Microsoft Office set of
productivity tools. All budgeting was done on Excel, which
involved the manual input of data. With Exchequer, however, this
information can be automatically updated in the accounting system
using a set of OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) functions. This
means that Techland can prepare general ledger balances, budgets or
stock re-costing in Word and Excel, and the information is
seamlessly transferred to Exchequer.
The ODBC module allows data within Exchequer to be imported
into other applications. Techland plans to use this functionality
for contact management and help desk applications. Exchequer
has enabled Techland to integrate all its customer relationship
management processes. It gives the company's staff instant access
to the data needed to offer a fast, flexible and proactive sales
service. It also means that any customer order queries can be dealt
with quickly and efficiently. The Report Writer module allows
detailed summaries for internal and external use to be produced
effortlessly.
The implementation of the new accounting system has allowed
Techland to make a quantum leap in customer relationship
management. Integrating disparate applications and systems has
enabled the company to maximise the usefulness and potential of its
customer data. The end result for Techland is enhanced customer
communication. After all, that's what the network faxing and
unified messaging business is all about.
