Niall Finnie, JW Grant's Stock and Purchasing Manager said, "After the implementation across the group, all the staff found BisTrack user friendly - I was a Branch Manager at the time and this was a key benefit for me. They could see how it was speeding up sales at the trade counter from quotations, price inquiries, order processing, and historic pricing and transaction searches."
A customized smart view within BisTrack provides Seanna with a full financial analysis on a daily basis. BisTrack also allows each department to create their own reports tailored to their specific requirements. "Branch managers can now look at the performance of each salesperson at any time and if they see anything unusual they can drill down to the sale and address any issues," said Niall Finnie.
Andrew McLellan, IT Manager, is trying to encourage all account customers to register to use the Web Track portal. He found the easiest way to do this was to visit them, talk them through the benefits, and actually show them how to use it. He also ran a successful campaign to get JW Grant's trade account customers to supply an email address for statements and invoices by offering a financial incentive on their account. "Since I've been doing this it's made a huge difference," he said. "We now have around 70% of customers with their invoices and statements sitting in their inbox as soon as we have finished the month-end run. We find that customers who receive their statements faster, tend to pay their bills faster!"
JW Grant's trade account customers are encouraged to use the BisTrack customer portal to access and download copy invoices, statements and proof of deliveries, and make payments to their account with the added security of not having to give their card details over the phone. The accounts department no longer receives so many phone calls and this allows the company to operate with a reduced number of back-office staff.
JW Grant has traded online for around 15 years but only for the last two through BisTrack's Web Track trading portal. "We used to update prices and products manually in our old online shop which was really time-consuming. Now it's tied into BisTrack and this happens automatically," said Seanna. "We offer around 90% of our stock profile online and sales increased by 107% in year two of being live with Web Track. Sales are mostly to retail customers so we can make good margins."
She continued, "Before BisTrack, trade account customers who do quotes in the evening could only see retail prices on our website. Now they can access their own prices through the portal and know to the penny what materials are going to cost them."
Seanna believes that the time savings and streamlined processing they get from using BisTrack has saved JW Grant a considerable amount of time and money since implementation. It has allowed them to focus on optimizing areas of the business with no increase to staff overheads - just a shift in allocation to other departments. Niall concluded, "I don't know where we would be now if we hadn't implemented BisTrack when we did. Certainly not generating our current turnover. We definitely made the right decision."