Soaring Eagle Distributors, the only Harley-Davidson dealer in the Pretoria region and one of the biggest in Gauteng, has used Pastel Evolution, the mid-market business solution from Softline Pastel, to integrate and streamline its operations and improve service to customers.
"Many businesses say it, but we really do build long-term relationships with our clients - because Harley-Davidson is that kind of a special brand," says dealer principle, Jos Joubert.
"Apart from the fact that we host the Harley Owners Group for this region, and arrange and participate in the breakfast runs and other family events, people who buy the bikes spend at least three months selecting their bikes and accessories before they take delivery.
"So we have got to know our 650 existing members very well indeed, and it is vital we maintain our contact with them in ways that are relevant to them. At the same time, we need to be able to service the nearly 400 new customers we attract every year in a more targeted way.
"We therefore wanted a solution that would give us superior customer relationship management (CRM) facilities, along with enterprise resource management capabilities that would automatically integrate with our administrative and accounting requirements - at a price that would be affordable for a single, independent dealership.
"Evolution met all our functionality requirements at 30% to 40% less than competitor products.
"Also, the vanilla version was all we needed. No customisation was necessary - even though we were introducing a Web store that would allow customers to browse our stock and parts online."
An additional advantage was the fact that Joubert and his internal information technology specialists could undertake much of the implementation once their Pastel Business Partner, About IT, had helped them with mapping and re-engineering their business processes and creating stock codes.
"When the customer has such a strong ownership ethic, the implementation always goes much more smoothly," says About IT's managing director, Roux Crawford.
"It helped that I had had previous experience of Pastel products," Joubert says, "but the software is so logically designed and so easy to use that we were able to save on implementation costs by doing a lot of it ourselves."
In fact, from the business' point-of-view, the change to Pastel was fairly radical in that its previous system had been old technology, without graphics or Internet capability. But Soaring Eagle Distributors staff had no difficulty adapting to Evolution because, as Joubert says, "most of us are young and highly-computer literate and are used to Windows-based applications."
The modules of Evolution implemented for Soaring Eagle's 10 users include bill of materials (for the clothing/accessory kits), job costing (for the service and maintenance centre), multi-warehousing (for portioning of stock between service and store), point of sale (for sale of peripheral and clothing lines), serial tracking (tracking of motor cycles), resolve CRM (tracking of incident history against clients as well as workflows for automating processes), and business intelligence centre (for reporting financials as well as projections).
"It's a very powerful tool," Joubert says. "You can basically do what you want with it."
Softline Pastel managing director, Steven Cohen, says Evolution's ability to fit the needs of just about every mid-market business with minimal or no customisation is because it is supported by Pastel's 18-year history as South Africa's main supplier of accounting and payroll software to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
"We understand SMEs inside out and we've always designed solutions for their very specific needs.
"So, any upgrades or innovations we bring to market are built on a well-established foundation, both intellectual and operational, that can easily be adapted or extended to enable new functionality as it evolves. And that's why we can be as cost-effective as we are while still providing the full spectrum of features and capabilities."
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