Case Study: Westcountry Group gains extra time and visibility using Access software

Problem

Westcountry Group (WG) has been a prominent commercial and education interior and refurbishment provider for over 45 years. However, WG were facing significant challenges with their quoting system. The company was heavily reliant on Excel, and their systems were siloed. This led to a lack of integration between various key processes, resulting in operational inefficiencies.

Dale Liesching, IT & Systems Manager, explains “We have had our Access finance solution since 2010 but we were struggling with trying to pull together a quoting system. We were trying to do it from an Excel package, and it was disjointed and didn't integrate with our current system.”

Solution

In response to these challenges, The Access Group proposed a transformative solution for WG. The Access Group moved their finance software to the cloud, enabling their existing finance and accounting system to be integrated with an Access suite of products, including Access CRM, Access Analytics and Data Engine. This strategic move provided them with the necessary tools and insights to enhance their business operations.

It brought together our estimating package with our customer base and gave us all the functionality of CRM, reporting, insights and analytics. We can now get the data and set rules and fields that need to be filled in, all in one place, which is really valuable for us.

Improved Visibility

Access Analytics provided real-time insights and stakeholder reporting, giving visibility of targets and automating the order update process. This enabled WG to track orders and view their progress, significantly improving transparency over operational performance and boosting customer service excellence

“Having Access Analytics has really helped to give everyone visibility of targets, so much so that we now have it displayed on screens around our offices. When orders get loaded, they ping onto the dashboards automatically and everyone can see where they're going and what they're heading towards. It’s massively helped with overall visibility, as well as running reports for management.”

Bespoke agile innovation from Access’s software development services allowed WG to automate the scheduling of orders and deliveries through custom workflow forms. This provided visibility into previous orders and automated stock allocations, which has improved paper order loading time by an estimated 50% and order lookup time by 30%.

“Having custom workflow forms has helped us with the scheduling of orders and deliveries going out. We didn't have any visibility of that before, but a lot of that's automated now, which has been a significant improvement.”

“It's been particularly useful in looking up previous orders to make it a more dynamic view. We're also now using it for posting paper orders, so we have two types of orders, one where they have an existing order on the system that they have called off deliveries from, and then another one which is for brand new orders that just go straight through and it's made it easier with using the APIs for stock allocations.”

Easy access

Access CRM enabled WG to organise their database and pull custom insights around their customer and prospect base. The structured data and easy filtering capabilities allowed for the extraction of useful data, providing significant benefits in targeting specific customer bases and extracting relevant data.

“We also saw unexpected benefits through using the CRM in that our data is now much more structured, and we can pull much more useful data out of it. For instance, now we can very simply use the filters to deliver specific data sets or customer groups that we want to target, something that we weren't able to do previously.”

The shift to cloud-hosted finance software also led to improved support capabilities and a reduced strain on the local server.

Moving to a hosted environment on the cloud has been beneficial in terms of reducing the strain on our on-premise server and with regards of ongoing support.

Results

Westcountry Group experienced a significant boost to productivity thanks to The Access Group’s suite of products. The visibility of targets improved significantly through Access Analytics, with real-time insights and custom reporting providing a dynamic view of operations.

The structured data and filtering capabilities of Access CRM empowered WG to extract powerful data, enabling more targeted customer engagement. Additionally, the shift to cloud-hosted finance software, and having all the solutions accessible through Access Workspace, streamlined operations and support processes, with the additional benefit of reducing the burden on the on-premise server.

Conclusion

In conclusion, The Access Group's innovative approach to integrating cloud-based solutions has not only addressed Westcountry Group's immediate challenges but also positioned them for sustained success in the future, with new technology driving operational excellence, business growth and giving WG a renewed competitive edge.