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Case study - Alltrade Alltrade supply electronics equipment such as cables, satellite dishes, amplifiers and antennae to TV installation companies and aerial riggers across the South East of England. Customers vary from one man bands working from home to contractors installing aerial systems at major hotels and hospitals, where one distribution system may support several hundred TV sets. Since he founded Alltrade in 1990 MD Steve Simper has seen it grow from a one-man company to one with a turnover of around £5 million. But this expansion has brought some problems in its wake: "With the growth of satellite TV, one of our main products is Sky satellite dishes. Because these are subsidised, Sky require us to send them a report every two weeks which lists the serial numbers of every one we've sold and the customer who bought it. These serial numbers are 17 digits long. In 1998, when we were still using Sage Line 50, we were recording everything manually. We had to type them onto the invoices by hand, then key them all over again into an Excel spreadsheet. Just to get the report out for Sky was taking 3 or 4 hours a week, apart from all the errors." "Another problem was that we had to have real-time stock control. With Line 50 when we entered a sales order, the stock was not committed instantly. So we'd tell a customer we had stock, but when we went to pick it, it wasn't there and we had to ring them back, say we couldn't supply, raise credit notes etc. It wasn't good enough. We deliver through our own vans, and if a customer places his order before 4.30 pm. we guarantee next day delivery. Fast service is a key issue for us and to achieve it we had to have real-time stock availability." " As regards stock control, Alltrade take customer orders in various ways. There's a trade counter downstairs, and they have recently installed the "Eluceo" product for taking orders online over the Internet, which is working well. But the great majority are taken over the phone via telesales. Because Alltrade guarantee next day delivery if an order is placed by 4.30 pm, the phones are particularly busy from 3 pm onwards. "When we enter an order for an item Datafile gives us the latest stock position, what's physically in stock, what's been allocated to other orders, what's on order from suppliers. Where items are available, we print out the invoice there and then and issue it to stores for next day delivery. If an item is short, it goes onto the back order report, which we check every morning." "One really useful feature is the fast search facility. For example, if a customer wants a Channel Master 1.2 metre dish, we just type in "1.2" and it lists everything with "1.2" in the description. It means my salesmen don't have to memorise lots of part numbers. It's the same with the customer search; we just have to put a piece of the customer's name and Datafile finds it. It's flexible too. We often take big orders, maybe up to 50 lines. We can jump out of the order and into the stock module half way through to check quantities of an item, and then come back into the order again." The real time stock control works extremely well. However, because the turnround at Alltrade is so fast (Steve estimates he turns his entire stock over every fortnight) it has to be totally reliable, the support from the dealer has been very good. "Datafile is built around a database, which you can amend as the company grows. For example, our reseller has designed an additional screen for us where we input what time and day of the week to call the customer, then every day it prints a list of customers for each of our Telesales reps to ring. The people at Datafile are good too. We encourage our customers to place larger orders and so minimise the number of deliveries and, they wrote a special mod for us, so that when the order rolls all the items on the order over to the next price band. I didn't think they could do that, but they did." Product: Datafile Premier Datafile Applications:
Website: www.alltrade.co.uk |
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Whether taking orders over the telephone, over the counter, or over the Internet, in the three years it has been installed Datafile has allowed Alltrade Aerials and Satellite Ltd to more than double their sales. Recent developments in technology have brought major changes to the television equipment business. Analogue is being converted to digital; new satellite channels are challenging BBC and ITV. Based in Portslade near Brighton , Alltrade Aerials and Satellite Ltd is a specialist distributor to this fast-moving industry .
So we needed a new system. Initially we looked at Sage Line 100 but it was a completely new product, not an upgrade, and we weren't terribly impressed by it. Then an introduction was made to Datafile. Finally, in late 1998 Alltrade went live with a 12 user Datafile system. There are four PCs in Customer Service department for handling telephone orders, one in Purchasing, two in Stores for deliveries and goods in, two on the Trade counter, and two in Accounts. Each week we receive about six pallet loads of Sky dishes. As they come into stores we zap them with a barcode reader to capture the serial numbers. We issue the dishes on a FIFO basis, so when a sales order goes onto the system Datafile immediately generates an invoice with the oldest serial numbers on it for the store man to pick. Every fortnight Datafile produces a Pro F iler report with the serial numbers of the dishes sold, the customer account number and the Sky registration numbers. In this area the time savings have been immense."