Case Study

Specialist DIY get fast ROI from remote SOP solution

Specialist DIY has been established for over 35 years supplying DIY retailers, builders' merchants and garden centres. They provide a comprehensive range of thousands of tools, hardware, fastenings, electrical and accessories under one single brand - SPECIALIST. They carry out ongoing reviews, assessments, inspections and testing of all products to ensure they are safe, legally compliant, and fit for the purpose they are intended.

Large stocks are stored at their 40,000 sq ft warehouse in Trafford Park, Manchester. From this central location their own fleet of vans deliver locally, and a first class carrier system is used for the rest of the UK, Ireland, Channel Islands and into Europe. All orders received into their warehouse before 2pm, will be delivered within two working days.

They employ a professional team of over eighty five staff, including a national sales force of over 10 people.

Manual process

Specialist DIY had been using the Global 3000 financial management system for a number of years. While this provided excellent information and control for staff based in the head office in Manchester, it was proving difficult keeping the mobile sales staff up to date with the latest stock availability and pricing data that was held on the system.

The sales staff were having to make numerous telephone calls and manually complete sales order forms that were then posted or faxed back to the head office. This presented a number of problems, Peter Unsworth of Specialist explains:

"Each morning when we came into the office we were faced with around 200+ order forms that had to be manually entered into the system by our accounts staff. This not only took them a long time, but there was also a lot of scope to make re-keying errors that cost us further time and money correcting."

Supporting the existing sales process

Faced with this dilemma Specialist approached Stockport based APH Computers who had previously provided them with the Global 3000 financial management solution. APH have extensive experience of designing and implementing solutions that allow remote staff to make use of the latest technology to enable them to be more productive.

They were able to recommend their remote sales order processing solution to resolve the problems. The APH system is an easy to use package that provides a single, fast and accurate sales order solution for mobile staff. It supports the entire sales order process by interacting and validating with an existing, officebased sales order processing system.