Electronic component distributor Soanar Electronics had been using a CRM package to manage design tracking within its sales and marketing network. Given the Melbourne-based company’s geographical spread, with offices throughout Australasia and South East Asia, this involved holding distributed information on multiple servers. This was cumbersome and synchronisation of data, including synchronising with the company’s Strategix ERP system, was an ongoing issue.

Design tracking requires quite a complex process as each product is treated as a project in its own right, with jobs being passed amongst multiple staff members to deliver the service. Reporting must also be available in multiple perspectives, for the supplier, customer, product, staff member etc. The existing solution was not able to deliver all of these requirements, and it was always a struggle to get staff to use it.

Soanar wanted to move to a more robust solution, which would be able to manage the workflow process more effectively. The company looked at several applications which were written specifically for design tracking and CRM before choosing the Strategix OneOffice solution, a front office upgrade to the Strategix ERP system already in use.

Why choose OneOffice?
Obviously data integration would no longer be an issue, but this was not the primary consideration. The company soon realised that OneOffice would be able to support its design tracking requirements because the package was highly configurable and it would deliver process and workflow data right to each person’s workspace. This meant staff would be spending less time jumping between different windows on their desktop, so increasing productivity.

OneOffice would also offer increased productivity to the company as a whole, with its tightly integrated workflow engine, CRM and context sensitive desktop integration. Additionally, the workspace dashboard would replace many reports and give a ‘start of day’ position including sales, gross profit, quotes, and inventory as well as a ‘to do’ type of action list, with outstanding quotes to chase and details of customers on hold.

Implementation
Implementation is currently nearing completion, as the systems for the sales, customer service, marketing and applications engineering groups are all in place. The implementation has been managed by job function or role to take advantage of the opportunity to refine the business processes as it was rolled out. Strategis has delivered new workflow actions and context sensitive ‘widgets’ as the productivity opportunities for each role are uncovered.

The role based modelling is also supported by role based dashboards. This is a modular system which gives a start of day position with full drill down functionality; as well as triggering any outstanding actions due for completion by role type. The dashboard is fully integrated back into the ERP system such that clicking on an action will launch the appropriate ERP program needed to resolve the problem.

The results
The implementations have been a revelation, with a trainer recently receiving a standing ovation from sales staff at one point. Soanar was taken aback by the impact of the OneOffice methodology on its staff, and particularly the impact of context sensitivity into the desktop environment. Response times have improved, productivity is up and staff are not having to run reports or jump across multiple screens to obtain information.

Context sensitivity in the OneOffice workspace means a total integration of business intelligence, CRM, workflow and processing screens in one place. While looking at a product on a customer’s order, the user has sales history, customer details, customer conversations, sales and profit, warehouse, shipping, workflow actions and product information all in the one place. Information really is at Soanar’s fingertips.

“I see OneOffice as the value driver for our sales force,” says Neil Walker, CEO of Soanar. “The CRM and dashboard tools deliver improved decision making to fuel our growth and enhance customer relationships.”

For more information
www.soanar.co.nz

Strategis Solutions
Mike Carroll
09 521 0724
021 521 072
mcarroll@strategis.co.nz
www.strategis.co.nz

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