Pama

Pama needed to replace an aging IT system that was restricting the company’s potential for growth. Pama had to rely too much on paper-based order and customer support processes and was keen to expand its business to the web. Its existing system suffered from reliability problems and couldn’t support a real-time website. In the back office, inaccurate inventory information and a lack of process control put huge pressure on warehouse staff to manually compensate for the inadequacies of the stock control system. Pama turned to Maginus for the solution.

Pama sells to customers in over 70 countries through multiple channels: telesales, field sales, via its website and through 28 ‘fonebitz’ retail outlets in service stations across the UK. At present, the company does most of its business through a 12-strong telesales team, and Maginus has brought new levels of efficiency to this operation.

Before using Maginus, sales staff would take an order by phone, write it on a pad and enter it into the company’s system later. Now they can process an order while the customer is on the phone. Operators can tell customers whether a product is in stock, or when it’s due in. The result is faster, more efficient customer service. Sales staff can handle more orders per day, and Pama has also reduced communication costs by not having to call customers back to explain stock issues or other problems with their order.

“The quality of information available to us has improved dramatically,” says Antony Warhurst, Pama’s Operations Manager. “With our previous system, we could never really trust the stock levels it would report. With Maginus, we get accurate stock data. And Maginus’ best-practice design means our buyers are required to enter specific data about new products during the buying process. All of this product information is instantly available to our sales teams when the product is delivered and ready for sale, and this has helped us increase sales revenue.”

Maginus makes it much easier for sales teams to sell related products and accessories. For example, if a customer calls about a hands-free unit for a particular phone, Maginus will highlight the accompanying cradle and aerial too. Maginus also makes it easy for Pama to manage the wide range of compatibility issues in the complex mobile phone market. For each product Pama sells, Maginus holds a list of which phones the product is compatible with, and can show a sales person only the products relevant to the particular needs of any customer. Maginus also helps sales staff track the profitability of each order. They can negotiate with customers within limits that are also controlled by Maginus.

Pama’s sales team also acts as first line support for customers, and the easy access they get to key information held in Maginus has helped them improve the way customer queries are handled. Simple queries can usually be handled immediately. For more complex queries, sales staff can use Maginus’ Contact Log to start a formal process for resolving the customer’s issue. The details are sent to Pama’s dedicated customer service team, and Maginus handles the whole process of query resolution.

“Pama conforms with BSI standards,” says Antony Warhurst. “Maginus has really helped us become BSI compliant because of the structured way it requires us to operate, and because of the wealth of vital information it manages for us.”
 

With Maginus already improving sales operations at Pama’s main offices, the company now plans to extend the same benefits to its team of six external sales people. Pama’s Sales Director used Maginus data to help rationalise the geographical area covered by each sales rep, and change the commission structure to encourage the development of new accounts and to improve margins. Mobile sales reps will be able to access Maginus data and enter orders from the field.

Using Maginus has greatly improved Pama’s reporting ability. Some reports are scheduled to run at certain times of day and then sent automatically to the relevant personnel. Users can also run ad-hoc reports directly from the Maginus system. The range of reports available to each user depends on their role in the organisation and is also controlled by Maginus.

“Maginus’ reporting facilities are very, very good,” says Pama’s IT Manager, Mark Smitham. “As we’ve got to grips with what the system is capable of, we’ve built up a library of ever-more sophisticated and elegant reports. Maginus gives us the real-time and historical analysis we need to maintain peak business performance.”

Behind the scenes, Maginus has helped Pama make huge improvements in warehouse efficiency. The company now takes advantage of cyclical stock counting where it had traditionally relied on an annual stock count. The annual stock count used to require Pama to shut down operations for an entire weekend, and even so the recorded level of stock was only reliable for a relatively short period of time. Using Maginus’ warehousing features and introducing a cyclical stock count means stock data is much more accurate, and this has reduced picking fails by 90%.

Using Maginus has also helped Pama reduce warehouse bottlenecks and backlogs. The system ensures that only orders with potential problems are prevented from moving through the process. If a customer’s order is in stock, and the order is within the customer’s credit limit, Maginus progresses the order normally. If there’s a problem, such as a customer going over their credit limit, Maginus alerts Pama to the issue. The end result is a much more predictable flow of orders through the warehouse, and in fact Pama has been able to process an increased order volume with fewer warehousing staff.

Pama now handles approximately 200 volume orders per day with despatch arranged through a number of carriers, the details of which are held in Maginus. To despatch an order, warehouse staff simply launch a report window in Maginus, scan the order number and enter the number of boxes and the weight. Maginus automatically produces the necessary carrier labels. Using Maginus the despatch process has been speeded up from a couple of minutes to a few seconds for each order.

“Maginus gives us access to information throughout the order cycle,” says Antony Warhurst. “We have great traceability, from purchase order and goods in, to warehousing, picking despatch and returns. The returns process has really been improved since we started using Maginus. Many of our products are serial coded so we can now identify which sales order a returned product is from, so we can refund it at the right price. In fact, we had one customer who returned goods which had serial codes that were different to those we’d supplied – so we had to return them to the customer as they had obviously been supplied by another company!”

Pama launched a brand new transactional website in March 2007 for its business customers, and expects the new site to generate an increasing proportion of the company’s overall revenue. All product information on the site is drawn from Maginus, and the view of prices each customer gets is based on the same Maginus business logic used by sales staff in the field and Pama’s offices. In other words, Maginus enables Pama to provide a seamless service across different sales channels. Customers can also track delivery of their orders from the web site.

Maginus’ true multi-channel capabilities also enable Pama to manage its fonebitz retail outlets in the same system. Replenishment requirements are submitted to Maginus via EDI, so the company can control the flow of stock across every channel. Maginus supports Pama’s dedicated export operations, too. Pama sells in bulk to international distributors, and this is all handled in the same Maginus system.

Pama plans to expand its use of Maginus capabilities in future, including the use of new putaway rules in the warehouse, interfaces with Quark Xpress for catalogue production and developing new promotional activities. “Maginus is a powerful multi-channel platform that’s really helping us to grow our business,” Antony Warhurst concludes.