Electropar Limited is a privately owned company that imports, manufactures and distributes electrical and control equipment in New Zealand and Australia, employing approximately ninety staff throughout New Zealand and Australia and with growing interests throughout Australasia and the Pacific Rim.

Electropar’s customer base primarily comprises of companies in industry sectors of oil and gas, defence, and power transmission and distribution Headquartered in Auckland, Electropar prides itself on a combination of high standards of customer service and technical expertise. Also skilled in product design, Electropar is able to adapt quickly to new manufacturing processes and techniques.

Challenges
Given the scope of work that Electropar delivers for its customers, the company required a customer relationship management solution that would enable it to capture communication with its customers at every stage of the relationship cycle.

“We started implementation of GoldMine in our marketing department initially. We required a data base that enabled us to communicate with our customers more effectively,” Tony Wallace, financial director at Electropar, explains.

“We used GoldMine to assist with the management of mailing lists and customer mail-outs. We were able to code all customers per industry and post-code so that information was easily accessible and managed effectively. This system enabled us to allocate the most appropriate sales manager to each customer – we wanted to ensure we were matching our customer’s needs with the most suitable Electropar staff member.”

As Electropar continued to grow it became increasingly important for the company to have a solution that could support this growth and also maintain transparency across every branch of the business. With growth stretching across the Tasman resulting in the opening of a sales office in Melbourne, Electropar also required a robust solution that would work just as effectively across geographical boundaries.

Given the success of the GoldMine solution in the company’s marketing and sales divisions, Electropar wanted to increase transparency across other departments, including finance and administration, as well as improving communications directly with staff on the ground such as its engineers and project managers – it was imperative for them to have full access to customer histories.

“We wanted to create greater visibility across our operations in New Zealand and Australia. We wanted all customer communication to be visible not only from a marketing and sales perspective, but we also wanted our engineers and project managers to have direct access to up-to-date information in real-time,” says Wallace.

Electropar needed to ensure that all issues were being tracked and resolved effectively and that they had a robust records managements system.

Solution
Having reviewed a number of alternative vendors in the market place, Electropar opted for FrontRange Solutions because it demonstrated a true understanding of its business requirements. Similarly, it opted specifically for the GoldMine CRM solution, due to its ease of use, its ability to integrate seamlessly with existing systems and its strong automation features.

“GoldMine has become a central part of our day-to-day business operations. It has fulfilled what it promised to do when we first implemented the solution. In fact, it has now gone beyond our initial requirements and is used as a live tool that has moved from a marketing and sales add-on, to assisting us in our finance and purchasing departments,” says Wallace.

“With staff located across a network of offices, GoldMine has also helped our employees to still remain part of the company culture given that all information is accessible and transparent throughout the entire organisation.”

Electropar selected Savio Solutions as their implementation partner having met with them several years prior, and being impressed with their well structured and detailed approach. At the time Savio struck Wallace as being a serious contender for upcoming projects.

“Savio were in a building phase of their business and we could see they were certainly serious about developing their GoldMine customer base. This gave us the confidence to place the 6.7 implementation with them,” he says.

“The subsequent 6.7 implementation went smoothly and we immediately had a more stable GoldMine program. This gave us confidence to continue to work away at using more features in the package and we did this including adding new fields and setting up the task bar to improve operator efficiency by linking to our Word, Excel and accounting files directly from GoldMine.”

Results
Since implementing GoldMine, Electropar has been able to fulfil and maintain its primary goal, to perform at the highest standard possible for its clients, and in turn provide its customers with the best level of service available in its industry sector. The company has been able to effectively track, prioritise and record customer data across all of its operations, thereby improving communications throughout the entire organisation.

Since implementing the GoldMine solution, Electropar has undergone a number of product upgrades to ensure that the solution is keeping pace with the company’s changing business needs “The GoldMine solution has really become an invaluable component of how we do business. The solution has grown as we have, and essentially become a key part of our core operating structure,” says Wallace.

“Through the implementation of GoldMine we have in fact reduced the number of staff on our sales team yet increased our sales over time. This in itself is a very real benefit of a CRM system of this calibre. It is a live tool that has improved efficiency and in turn productivity for our organisation.”

Electropar’s utilisation of the customised task bar, which allowed users to link all information stored in GoldMine back to the company’s central server, was a good example of how GoldMine’s flexibility benefited the company.

“With a centralised database and access to all customer communication we now have more accurate information at our disposal, which in turn enables us to better serve our customers through better informed business decisions,” says Wallace.

In May 2008 Electropar awarded Savio the contract to upgrade GoldMine 6.7 to the new Premium Edition. “The project is running to plan, with Savio delivering training now and go-live scheduled for mid June 2008,” says Wallace.

“Premium Edition is generating excitement for confident users along with a bit of the usual apprehension from the new GoldMine users. During the training period, on a mock database, we are agreeing on best practice for the use of Premium Edition within Electropar. It’s certainly user friendly and offers many ways to achieve the same result,” he says.

“Ultimately GoldMine has provided us with a very solid foundation from which we do our business. It is a very flexible tool, simple to use with meaningful outcomes for our company.”

For more information
Savio Solutions Limited
www.saviosolutions.com

Sven Martin, Director
Ph +64 9 523 0845
Mob +64 21 365 415
sven.martin@saviosolutions.com

8/6/10_ex_m_nl_h