Question: How do you crack down on costs, improve efficiency, increase sales and improve your customers’ experience, without spending a fortune in these tough times?

Answer: Well, you could do worse than follow the example set by the UK’s leading bathroom distributor and long-time Blue Rock client, Ideal Bathrooms.
Ideal have worked with the staff of Blue Rock for more than 10 years, and have a 64 user computer system that operates from  four different sites strategically located across  the length of the UK.
With £5 million of bathroom products in stock, a fleet of 41 delivery vehicles and a next day, nation- delivery service to 99% of its customers, Ideal depend upon brilliant logistics and relies on the services of  Blue Rock  to keep it running.
When French building conglomerate Saint-Gobain, one of world’s top one hundred industrial corporations, took over Ideal it listened to the directors request to keep its tried and tested relationship with Blue Rock and not move to the corporate solution .
It is a fully integrated business system that handles the complete process, from stock checking at the initial enquiry right through to raising delivery notes, invoices and statements. It updates stock levels, warns the buyer when time to reorder, generates management information and runs its own full accounts package.

That wasn’t enough for Ideal’s operations director, Kim Kirby-Earnshaw. Last year she added the document management system (DMC) to the software and reckons the investment has all but paid for itself already.
Kim said: ‘Blue Rock installed the DMC in October and it went without a hitch. Now we send all our sales invoices and statements to our customers by email or fax, whichever method they prefer.
‘We have a large customer base so that alone has saved us £1,800 a month in manpower and postage, with taking into account the other benefits.
‘And we know the paperwork has been successfully delivered, so we don’t hear the “We’ve never received your invoice” story when we are chasing for payment!
‘Some customers ask for a fax confirmation once they have placed an order with us. We take some 30% of orders by fax; about 5% by email and the rest are handled by the 23 staff who work in our central phone sales office in Milton Keynes.
‘Whichever way the order comes in our system generates a mirror image of the order instantly which is sent within seconds to our customer, showing the full information, including any out of stock items.
‘We use the same system to place our purchase orders with our suppliers.’

The document management system has saved Ideal money, improved efficiency and given more information more quickly to its customers and manufacturers.
But Kim is still not satisfied and now plans to add automatic scanning of the 1,000 + delivery notes Ideal’s delivery drivers return to the depots every day.
Kim said: ‘By adding a barcode to the delivery note the DMC will be able to scan the document and automatically send each customer electronic proof of every delivery – no punching of delivery note numbers or manual filing required, so less errors and less staff required to do, what is, a pretty boring job.

Last year was a particularly busy one for Ideal with the company buying the Glasgow based bathroom distributor, In-Line Sales and Distribution. That business will soon complete the full integration of its computer systems to Blue Rock.
The sales side of Ideal has also benefited from add-ons to the Blue Rock software. The company added Sales Console to its system and it has proved a major success.
Kim said: ‘Our sales director, Rob St. Barbe, is always singing Sales Console’s praises! He says it tells him what individual clients are doing at any one time.’

Sales Console provides the ability to track, analyze, and understand all aspects of a business, and can easily and quickly be manipulated to fit an individual company’s actual requirements.
It enables management to see what is being sold to which customer, when, where and by whom, critical in identifying profitable customers, any low performing sales reps, and any slow moving products.
Drifting customers, missed cross sell opportunities, “cherry picking” accounts or salesman are immediately identified and alerts are sent out, allowing any potential problems to be acted upon before they become major issues.