Leading Australian provider of promotional products, Epicentre, has achieved significant efficiency gains and improved customer satisfaction by implementing SYSPRO.
Seventy users from finance, management, sales, marketing, order entry and purchasing use SYSPRO to better manage the business, while customers access the system through Epicentre's Web site to review account status, place orders and obtain information.
Mark Bunt, General Manager for Epicentre, says the company needed a robust solution which could accommodate Epicentre's CRM and reporting requirements, and help it cope with expected growth.
From a shortlist of four potential suppliers, SYSPRO was selected for its ability to provide Epicentre with a real-time view of different parts of the organisation based on a single database. The fully-integrated solution enables tracking of items from the source to the end location, and identifies all cost elements along the way, providing a more accurate way to determine exactly where costs belong.
"SYSPRO's ability to accommodate the anticipated growth and locally support us if we choose to take the business to other regions, like China, was a further major consideration," Bunt says. "We gave each candidate a problem and SYSPRO very quickly came up with a solution to an extremely complicated part of our business, demonstrating an understanding that far exceeded our expectations."
As a result of the implementation, Epicentre has reduced quoting and order entry time by 70% and 50% respectively. The time taken to produce month-end financial reports has dropped by 60%, while increased capacity has enabled the company to absorb significant business growth with no additional staff requirements.
"SYSPRO provides visibility of imported goods while facilitating the control of associated costs. We can now cost independent designs quickly and accurately, confident that our calculations are correct. We can also pass significant discounts onto our customers that previously we weren't sure we could afford," Bunt says.
Prior to SYSPRO, it could take up to six months to train a new customer service person on the order entry process. With SYSPRO's user-friendly screens, a new person is fully-operational on standard orders within one week.
Additional benefits include dramatic improvements in time to market, customer service and inventory control. SYSPRO has identified a number of errors in business processes and helped to automate shipping, with the ability to consolidate orders on one invoice, or multiple deliveries on one order or across multiple orders.
SYSPRO's purpose-built solution for the custom side of Epicentre's business enables independent designs to be quoted quickly and accurately. Previously, this manual process took approximately three hours for each quote. Now, quotes for simple designs are completed in 10 minutes, with more complex design quotes taking less than an hour.
According to Bunt, the system paid for itself in 18 months. "SYSPRO enables us to analyse our clients more accurately. Better profitability and cost-of-sales analysis enables us to offer incentives that we couldn't previously. We're operating more efficiently and it's helped us become more competitive," he says.
"SYSPRO is a robust solution that we know we won't have to change to meet varying market needs. It's flexible and easy to use, both from an IT point of view and an end-user perspective. SYSPRO has enabled us to reduce complexity throughout the entire business."
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