Glasfit, South Africa's fastest growing motor and flat glass fitment franchise and joint venture network, uses a combination of Pastel Partner and Pastel Evolution to administer 77 fitment centres as well as a distribution centre. It uses the same technology to facilitate the addition of up to 15 new fitment centres per year.
“At this point in our growth phase, I need to produce 55 separate monthly accounts covering all our different interests - including the Gauteng distribution centre that handles up to R10 million worth of inventory a month,” says Glasfit financial manager Hendrik Lamprecht. “Pastel Evolution, which runs that distribution centre as well as our head office, and Pastel Partner, which runs the regional distribution centres handling about R3 million a month and each of the regional offices, enables me to do that pretty much at the touch of a button.
“At the same time, the Pastel products linked to an add-on written for us by Trew Solutions automates the processing of insurance claims for us and enables us to give customers a better service through our call centre.”
Initially, Glasfit fitment centres had to capture customer details on their own systems in order to generate an invoice for insurance companies - as well as having to calculate the excesses themselves.
The Trew Solutions add-on invoicing module now allows call centre agents to download customer details to a fitment centre, where it then automatically populates an insurance invoice as well as calculating the excess. The invoice is then uploaded back to the call centre so agents can provide customers with the relevant information.
With Glasfit undergoing extremely rapid growth, it also needed a solution that would scale easily.
“Which is why, having started out on Pastel Partner some seven years ago, we've simply upgraded where necessary to Evolution,” Lamprecht says. “Why incur the disruption of a new system when all our users are confident on Pastel - and it does everything we ask of it?”
“We tried to make the roll-out of new fitment centres as easy as possible from a technology point of view,” says Rochelle Booyens, project manager for Trew Solutions, Glasfit's implementation partners. “We wrote the invoicing add-on and other customised items in such a way that they could be installed by Glasfit's own information technology (IT) staff as part of each new Pastel implementation.
“Glasfit, therefore, has full business process standardisation across each of its fitment centres, each regional office works off exactly the same information for its month-end report to head office, and there is no break in the continuity of information from the regions when a new centre is opened.
“And, Glasfit has the flexibility to be able to consolidate information as well as report on each business centre separately - depending on the business need - without needing to call us in.
“The fact that Pastel products are so stable while also being easily integratable with third-party applications makes all that possible.”
Softline Pastel managing director, Steven Cohen, says: “Glasfit is one of the many franchises that use Pastel to run their business. They trust it not only because of its track record as a ready-to-use accounting solution, but also because it is flexible enough to allow industry-specific add-on functionality developed on its software development kit (SDK). Pastel also offers strong reporting functionality through its business intelligence add-on module, which is particularly useful from the franchisor perspective.”
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