Inmans

The decision to upgrade its back office systems was an essential step in Inmans journey to its ten-year business goal. The company had outgrown its previous systems and found many areas in which they were holding it back. This was particularly apparent in the company’s relationship with key suppliers.

"Many manufacturers had begun to insist on communicating with us electronically, via EDI",said Stephan Hollingshead, Deputy Chief Executive of Inmans. "Using Maginus has given us this EDI capability for the first time, and that means we can play a key role in the supply chain."

"We now have quite sophisticated capabilities to exchange data with suppliers. This level of automation, and integration with our suppliers, will be vital in our growth plans", he continued.

Another valuable feature of Inmans Maginus solution is the tight integration between sales and logistics. Inmans has eight telesales and 10 field sales staff who now have much better access to stock information. Maginus provides a wealth of information on easy-to-use screens and advanced search tools that make it simple to bring up customer or inventory information instantly. With accurate information at their fingertips, sales staff can now deliver a much faster and more reliable service to customers.

Maginus also provides extensive control over pricing. Sales teams can negotiate prices with some customers, while others use pre-negotiated discounts. Maginus lets Inmans use multiple price lists to control this process, and Inmans has seen an improvement in pricing accuracy as a result.

"Maginus lets us operate a much more proactive sales operation", said Stephan Hollingshead. "We went live in June 2006, and by November we’d had our best-ever sales month, even though one of our sales staff had left the company. With the support of Maginus we plan to increase our telesales activities and start new outgoing telesales operations in the near future."

Maginus’ advanced warehousing functionality has brought significant improvements to the stock control process at Inmans. Before Maginus, the company had to shut its warehouse for a whole day for stocktaking. Maginus provides much tighter control over stock management and has also enabled Inmans to increase the speed of its warehousing operations. Turnover from Inmans Bristol warehouse has increased by 75% since the introduction of Maginus, without increasing stock levels or staffing, because Maginus enables the company to use much more efficient picking zones.

Inmans has also seen an improvement in stock replenishment with Maginus’ ‘recommended replenishment’ functionality, which has reduced overheads in its purchasing department by 25%. Other improvements include reducing back orders by two thirds - a result of greatly improved stock management. This has also helped make dramatic improvements in order fulfilment: the company can fulfil 20% more orders immediately with Maginus, resulting in improvements in customer service and financial performance.

Using Maginus has also enabled Inmans to reduce the number of customer credits it has to issue and manage. Inmans can now invoice customers when products are delivered, rather than ordered. "This has reduced the number of credits by a third, and saved about half of an ‘employee’ in the time spent managing credits", said Stephan Hollingshead. "It also makes the ordering process much slicker from the customer’s perspective. It’s these incremental improvements in efficiency that add up to growth in the bottom line, and I’m confident we’ll continue to see additional improvements in the future."

Maginus’ advanced reporting capabilities also bring substantial benefits to Inmans. Maginus provides a graphical plug-in reporting module that managers have on their screens. They can see the performance of sales teams for that day, or a set period, at a glance.

Maginus also makes it much easier to distribute information to sales teams and managers. Inmans can schedule reports to run automatically, overnight, and distribute the results as pdf files for action in the morning. "Reporting is a different world with Maginus", said Chris Simpson, IT Manager at Inmans. ‘"If you can see iton screen, you can report on it. Maginus also lets us design our own reports and documents. This is vital when, for example, a customer asks for specific information to be included on reporting documents. This actually happened with one customer who wanted their own product numbers on our invoices. With Maginus we could make the change instantly."

This reporting flexibility has also created some surprising opportunities for cost reduction. Inmans previous IT systems required expensive continuous pre-printed paper for printed output. With Maginus, Inmans can design its own documents and print them in the more cost-effective, standard A4 format.

A strong relationship with a software partner is important to support Inmans long-term growth plans. Maginus customers are part of a vibrant user community that’s supported by an official User Group and regular User Conferences. "We have a really good relationship with Maginus", said Stephan Hollingshead, "and with the user group too this helps plan for future activities. It’s particularly helpful to talk with other Maginus customers, especially companies that have used Maginus for a number of years."

Inmans will continue to develop and exploit the potential of its Maginus solution. This will be vital to support its increasingly national ambitions with plans to open another two warehouses in the near future, and to launch a business-to-business trading website. "With Maginus at the heart of our company, we have a solid foundation and the flexibility to expand our operations to meet our business goals", Stephan Hollingshead concludes.

Philips has always been a key brand in Inman’s portfolio. However in 2005 Philips decided it needed to appoint a principal distributor and reduce it’s distributor base. The principal distributor was required to have a proven track record in Philips products along with the operational capability to deliver Philips’ ambitious plans. Maginus was instrumental in demonstrating to Philips that Inmans could deliver the sophisticated supply chain control and account management information specified by Philips. Stephan Hollingshead comments, “Our appointment as Philips principal distributor is our most important achievement in the recent history of the company.” The appointment has resulted in a more than four-fold growth in the value of Philips products distributed and is a major factor in the substantial growth achieved in 2007-8.