Success stories:
Ribtex International Pty Ltd

Wholesale business gets crafty with powerful analytics.

Location

Australasia

Industry

Wholesale and distribution

Solution

Access Workspace, Access Analytics, Express Leave, Learning Management System

Background

An Access Group client since 2018, Ribtex International have adopted several Access software solutions, including Access Analytics, Express leave, and a sophisticated Learning Management System; all delivered through our flagship product – the cloud-based, single sign on platform, Access Workspace. As an early adopter of these solutions, Ribtex International are seeing success by way of huge time savings across their team of 30 people, located in the Melbourne office and on the floor in warehouses.

What Simon Newey, General Manager of Ribtex says about Access software solutions

We save at least two or three days every month thanks to the simplified process and capability of the Access Analytics tool. It’s easier for our new people to pick up and use, and we can get the right information in our hands more readily. We’ve also seen fewer questions come back to our customer service team and it’s given our sales reps better visibility of trends around products and more information about each customer so they’re able to see if orders have dropped off or picked up.

Working with Access Workspace has been very simple, which is a big bonus. The fact that it’s cloud-based means I can invite someone in and they have access to everything I give them access to – the simplicity of that has been beneficial.

When the demos of Access Analytics came out it really appealed to us because once you’re set up and the dashboards are built it’s so easy to consume the data, and more importantly for us, to share it with the people who need to know.

Integration is never an easy thing, and that is one of the major benefits of Analytics on Access Workspace – it’s not a third-party tool I have to integrate into our other systems, which means if there’s an error somewhere it’s a lot easier to find and fix.

We don’t have anyone internally who is comfortable operating the data engine, and I have found we can always lean on The Access Group for that help whenever we need it.

I can see the Access team investing and continually working on improvements to the data engine, and that means there’s a real future there for us with this product and the other surrounding systems that support our financial management.

Challenges facing Ribtex

As craft wholesalers, the business imports craft materials and sells to large customer facing businesses such as Spotlight, Lincraft, Officeworks and The Reject Shop – as well as to a number of school suppliers and via a direct-to-consumer store (Arbee Craft).

With so many partners relying on having the right stock in the right stores at any given time, getting accurate insights was paramount for Ribtex.

According to Ribtex General Manager Simon Newey, the main challenge the business was facing – and turned to The Access Group to help solve – was around this flexibility and accuracy of reporting.

“Previously we would spend a lot of time extracting data into Excel and using pivot tables to interrogate the numbers. This meant a lot of time spent generating reports every month and it would take even longer if custom reports were needed,” Mr Newey said.

“For sales reps out on the road this was a particularly big challenge as it could take hours, across multiple days, to pull the data and get the insights they needed to inform discussions and stock recommendations with customers.

“It also meant the time to upskill new employees would blow out, as people are often not comfortable with Excel and can be easily overwhelmed when faced with complicated spreadsheets.”

Everything in one place with Access Workspace

The result, according to Mr Newey, is that Ribtex has given their people access to “more information, more readily”.

“The learning component through the Learning Management System has been great. As a small business we don’t have a formal LMS, so having that available on Access Workspace has been really helpful; it’s a great bonus.” Mr Newey said. “The LMS has helped us in the training for Analytics, and having the courses there on the same platform saves us so much time. I can definitely see the benefit of the collaboration this enables as it removes a lot of noise.”

Access to the right support

Mr Newey said the product introduction and demos gave the business a good chance to understand what the Analytics product could do for them and whether it was a right fit for the business.

“Once we went live, the technical implementation was painless. Access was very good at supporting us through that, and as part of the sign-up we got free training on Analytics and access to learning courses and guides that have been very helpful when onboarding new team members.

When we implemented, we realised the default insights and data were very focused on dollar sales as opposed to unit sales, which is a key reporting metric for us as it informs stock requirements, what we need on hand, and minimises stock outages for our customers. The Access team were very good at helping us create some new data extracts to show us the numbers that matter to us.”