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Computers Now. ERP implemenation success story
Company profile
Computers Now is a leading Australian reseller of Apple hardware and software. The business has a strong retail presence of 10 locations across Australia combined with a dedicated team for Education as well as Professional and Corporate sales.
Situation
Computers Now had been operating for many years with a number of key systems but had a growing need to integrate their CRM with retail, inventory, service and financials. National Service Manager Robert Ruigrok explains: “We had a number of reasons for changing systems. We wanted to reduce the time overhead per transaction in the retail environment which during peak periods can be very high volumes. We were looking for a system that fully integrated every part of our business and the combination of prior solutions were not meeting these needs. Customer management and quoting were on separate system to day to day invoicing, accounting, service call tracking and inventory management - we needed to bring them together.”
Another primary goal for the business was to look to the future with regards to integrating mobility of the CRM into the business. “We were moving towards greater use of laptops and mobile handheld devices so the system we chose needed to be future-ready for the mobility of our CRM plans” adds Ruigrok.
Choosing HansaWorld
Ruigrok explains “We conducted a selection process where we informally looked at 6 solutions on the market, then shortlisted and formally evaluated the final 3 solutions. Following a series of demonstrations and other investigations we concluded that HansaWorld was broad enough to touch every area of our business with the added major bonus of being able to run native on the Apple platform. Another important factor is that we run our operation over multiple locations and it was a key requirement to have a lightweight client that was not network intensive. Many of the other software vendors offered solutions that were high bandwidth and low performance which, with our volume of transactions, just wasn’t worth the risk. Last - but by no means the least it was paramount that we felt the comfort that we were dealing with a like-minded company who understood our business needs. At the end of the day no CRM upgrade or migration is an easy task and the type of business you choose to partner with can make or break the project”
Solution details
Computers Now implemented HansaWorld between the months of July and November 2007. Ruigrok says “It was refreshing to have the initial commitment and understanding to the way we do business and to see that it was followed through in every step of the project implementation. An implementation like this is full of challenges in every area of the business. It is never easy but having the right team on the job can make or break the challenge.
The final result is that we currently run HansaWorld with an average of 140 users across 9 retails stores with a suite of Full financials, Centralised purchasing, Full inventory management, Workshop service/repairs, Education and Corporate sales, CRM for opportunity tracking as well as sales and marketing departments. There are plans to continue to open more retail locations and increase the number of users as the organisation continues to increase in size. Ruigrok says “Although it is clear that HansaWorld is extremely effective in the wider CRM market HansaWorld’s commitment to the way Apple resellers do business was clear from the outset. They have always been true to their word in following through with developments. With the partnership between Computers Now and HansaWorld now in place, we look forward to growing our business together in the years to come.
A further point to add is that in a migration of this size we have only just scratched the surface of what we can do with the system. Our prime goal has been to replace the functionality of prior multiple systems in one central, unified workflow. In a company of our size this is a significant feat in itself!
We now look forward to integrating many of the great workflow and communication features of Hansaworld that are future focused and will be of great benefit to the productivity of the business moving forward”.
Benefits and results
Since implementing HansaWorld Computers Now haverealised major improvements in efficiency and performance a cross the business.
- Reduced training time by 75%
- Integration of Quoting and Sales Orders resulted in time efficiency
improvements.
- Same month went live with HansaWorld was biggest sales month ever!
 | “With HansaWorld we have dramatically reduced training time for retail operations by 75%. Despite considerable growth as a business, we have maintained the same number of people in the commercial accounts department through better control of information. Integration of our quoting and orders processing time reduced by 20%. This is a major efficiency improvement for us considering we do more than a 1000 transactions per day! | |
“December was our biggest sales month ever - and was less than a month after we went live with the system! The big assumption is that if you are only 4 weeks into a new system then people are not going to be as quick as they would be in a 3-4 months so this was an indication of the ease of use and adoption by all staff. The uptime of the software has been 99.8% in 7 months and overall the system stability has been excellent.” explains Ruigrok.
“We are very happy with our decision to implement HansaWorld because, amongst other things, Apple has specific and required functionality that was initially written as customisation and has now been included as standard functionality not just for our use but the entire Hansaworld customer base.”
Future
In future months, Computers Now and HansaWorld will implement new modules and functionality such as business intelligence tools and integration of more business workflow using the standard tools offered in the software.
To read the entire case study, you can download it here
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