Nutrilida, supplier of over-the-counter nutritional supplements and other healthcare products to pharmacies & wholesalers, has chosen the FrontRange Solutions contact management and sales automation solution, GoldMine, as the cornerstone of its information management systems.
"While our legacy system contained a lot of information, it couldn`t analyse or report on it," says Nutrilida information technology (IT) manager, Etienne Dreyer. "By contrast, GoldMine`s ability to integrate information from multiple systems into a common database enables us to electronically collect data from the diverse systems of our customer organisations - and automate the process of linking products to sales and commissions.
"As a result, we can now draw reports per product or per sales person on more than 4 000 items of sales information per month. Of course, that gives us crucial agility in the marketplace in terms of being able to track the popularity of individual products and adjust our marketing accordingly. But it has also enabled us to cut costs. For instance, we`ve been able to slash the time needed to calculate commissions by days - and free up the time of the people in charge of commissions for other work within the organisation.
"And we`ve been able to achieve all this with only five GoldMine users."
According to Dreyer, GoldMine is so easy to use and implement that the installation period of one month could have been significantly shorter had it not been for the quirks of data capturers. "We had to address the oldest database problem - the inconsistency of the way people fill in data fields - by taking the time to create a master data file that would recognise, for instance, `phy`, `pharmacy` and `apteek` as the same thing."
GoldMine has also made it easier for marketing staff to build relationships with customers by automating the process of targeting suitable customers and distributing to them marketing material - such as direct mail, product leaflets and quotations - tailored to their specific interests.
"The productivity of our marketing and sales departments has been significantly enhanced," Dreyer says. "They can maintain much closer and much more relevant contact with our market generally and our customers specifically."
Nutrilida plans to use GoldMine as the core database for customers, suppliers and wholesalers.
FrontRange Solutions (SA) managing director, Tracey Newman, believes that Nutrilida`s implementation of GoldMine is a good example of the product`s ability to help mid-market companies move into a new league of efficiency and effectiveness without having to add skills or resources. "Information on its own is only useful in terms of the potential it offers you to run your business more effectively and, consequently, grow it with least fuss and cost.
"GoldMine`s value lies in its extraordinarily rich functionality and the years of experience of both our product developers and our customers that has been built into it. It therefore makes it unusually easy and affordable for organisations to exploit the potential of their data in ways that are most relevant to their own improvement and growth."
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