5 Stars for Ease of Use, 5 Stars for Features and 5 Stars for Value for Money

Case Study - Cool Designs

Cool Designs Ltd was launched in 2003. We supply the Air Conditioning trade with air conditioning products and accessories and are a distributor for marker leaders Toshiba Air Conditioning. Since 2004 we have used Sage L50 at two of our offices. One in the North East and one the North West. This meant that each office ran independently, although invoices were batch inputted into the main system at one office each week. As the business has grown (2007 Turnover @ £5M), using Sage L50 threw up more frustrations and limited our operation and it became apparent that we needed to move to a new system. We generally raise around 300 invoices per month, but one sales order can have two to three invoices associated.

What we really needed was a central system that we could link into so that the whole company viewed the same data that was live permanently. Also, as we have an external sales team, it would have been useful for us to be able to securely log in for remote locations. It was at this time that we were introduced to Interprise. We found that it not only offered exactly what we were looking for, but more. Offering new idea’s in our own approach to how we done business. They key elements of this were the ability to add new users and warehouse locations quickly and easily, adding inventory kit items meaning that we can manipulate orders quicker than ever before, a powerful CRM package that allows us much tighter control and reporting on quotations and then the ability to almost one click a quotation into a sales order and then again into a purchase order. We currently have the ten user licence though actually have around 12-14 people who can log in to the system.

Since using Interprise, we have found that we have been able to implement new systems and controls and yet despite the extra usage from the package, we have sped up a lot of our standard operations so the net effect was additional output with no additional time requirement. We have also just opened a new office and with Interprise it was easy to add a new location and a couple of new users. These then can log directly in to the server remotely using the WAN connection. Regarding the WAN connection, this has probably been the single biggest benefit. This has allowed us the maximum flexibility that is required in today’s market. It might be that we need access after hours or on a weekend or even that our accountant needs to log in to look at some data. Either of these is now possible. Another benefit was from an accounts perspective, the Interprise system enters a stock value through the P&L as the month moves on, this means that at any time I can get an accurate P&L report without having to manually adjust our stock level. As interprise attaches purchase invoices to purchase orders, it then adjusts the P&L accordingly if there was any change to the buy price. Again, accurate reporting is an essential part of modern business.

Overall, we found the competitive costing of the package, its modern and flexible nature as well as the support from the Interprise team to make Interprise our number one choice. We did of course look at other options but our view was that they were dated and costly. Not only this, but at the moment we only use around half of the features of Interprise and are looking forward to implementing more of its standard operations that will again enhance our business.