Customer Profile
Sector: Education
Industry: Educational Products
This book supplier is a full service resource for their customers. The company offers thousands of books from major publishers along with many small, independent presses. They provide their customers with personalized, one-on-one service along with the convenience of ordering products online.
Business Situation
Order Tracking Issues
A customized solution was needed to handle their expanding business. Home grown systems were being used to enter and process orders, manage books offered, and track customers. Day to day operation was becoming inefficient and unorganized. A re-organization of the systems used for operations was needed. The company also wanted to build an E-commerce website to generate additional business and allow existing and new customers to place orders online.
Salesperson Inefficiency and Lost Opportunities
Sales staff would visit their customers and would use a paper catalog to find books their customer would like. Searching for books in a paper catalog became time consuming and very difficult for new sales staff to memorize. Sometimes sales staff would miss opportunities to provide their customers with the books they need because they couldn’t find them in the catalog. The company needed to give the sales staff a system that would allow them to quickly search for books while visiting their customers. The system would also need to give sales staff the ability to enter customer orders and print them out.
Mass Ordering Inefficiency
One of their customers is a school district that orders thousands of books every year. When it was time for the school district to place book orders, they would have to manually key in the ISBN number for each book one by one into their procurement system. Once the order was entered into the district’s procurement system, they would have to place the order with the book supplier. This duplication of effort became very time consuming and strenuous on the school district staff.
Book Inventory Management
The company offers thousands of books in their catalog from many different book manufacturers. Tracking the books offered by all their manufacturers was becoming very time consuming and unorganized. A system was needed to manage the books in the company’s catalog.
Solution
Order Tracking System
An internal Ordering Tracking system was developed using Microsoft Access.
- Enter and process customer
- Centralized database
- Keeps orders organized
- Processing time down to a minimum
- Maintains a master list of customers with billing and shipping information.
E-Commerce Website
A new E-commerce website was designed to give the company a presence on the web.
- Central access point to the company
- Showcase of products, binding, cataloging, and consulting services
- Online accounts for customers
- Complete list of books
- Robust search functionality
- Compile a list of titles
- Receive an automated calculation of the total cost of a list
- Purchase the titles in a list
Salesman Database
The Salesman database provides sales staff with a simple method to search the complete book catalog using a number of different options to search on.
- Quickly give customers a selection of books
- Customer can add recommendations to their order
- Customer order can then be printed out when satisfied
Punchout
Punchout was implemented by the book supplier so that the school district could place orders more efficiently.
- School district now directly references online book catalogue from procurement system
- Books are easily selected and added to the purchase order
- School district has direct access to their current book catalogue.
- Books are automatically added and the purchase order is set
- Order information is automatically sent to the book supplier
- After approval, electronic notification is sent to the book supplier
- Saves both parties time and accuracy.
This investment by the book supplier proves to the school district that they strive for and deliver customer service.
Titles Management and Book Catalog System
The Titles Management System provides an efficient method to manage the catalog of books.
- Titles can be easily added or modified through ISBN Barcode or manually
- Easily categorize and Group Books according to Awards, Authors and Publishers
- Reporting allows the identification of books no longer being manufactured
- Upload the entire catalog from the Access system to website in a highly automated and simple process
- Internet users have access to the latest book catalog
Keeping the internet catalog in sync with the company’s master catalog is effortless and requires minimal time.