Trilanco

Trilanco offers some 9,000 products, about 1,000 of which are controlled drugs and medicines. It's a true multi-channel business, with five field sales reps, six telesales staff and a transactional website. Every channel is run through Maginus using the same central store of product and stock data.

In the field, Trilanco's sales reps use Maginus Mobile, running on PDAs. It's a 'light' version of Maginus that provides essential product, customer, stock and ordering functionality. Sales reps can complete contact log action - for example, recording customer enquiries or complaints - check pricing and stock availability and place orders when they're with the customer. The information captured is available to Trilanco's Sales Manager for reporting purposes, too.

"Feedback from the sales reps is very positive," said Gary Molloy, IT Manager at Trilanco. "Maginus Mobile provides the core capabilities they need in an easy-to-use format, and helps improve the service they can offer when face-to-face with a customer."

The full version of Maginus can also be run remotely, and this is extremely beneficial at trade shows. At a recent show, Trilanco staff could enter orders directly into the system from the stand. They could offer impressive on-the-spot service to customers, letting them know if products were in stock and taking orders immediately. Some customers actually had the order waiting for them when they got back from the event. In the past, orders would have been written down and processed back at the office, several days later.

Using Maginus has enabled Trilanco to streamline the functionality and information available to its telesales team. Staff now have instant access to product information and pictures, as well as hyperlinks to supplier sites. This is often vital for accessing the latest information about drugs and medicines, such as dosages and contra indications (situations when a medicine should not be given). Before using Maginus, telesales staff had to look this information up in a book.

Maginus also helps ensure that sales staff don't sell restricted drugs and medicines to the wrong people. Some customers, such as vets, will have the required permissions from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, and these permissions are stored in Maginus. If a customer tries to buy a restricted product without permissions, Maginus raises an alert and provides information about the next steps the customer should take. The overall effect of this more efficient and automated sales approach is that Trilanco is taking orders much more quickly, reducing the time and cost of each order. The company now takes 20% more orders with one fewer sales person.

Trilanco's catalogues are designed using Quark Express. Maginus integrates with Quark to import product names, descriptions, prices, images and other important data, which speeds up the catalogue creation process dramatically. A 300-page catalogue created using Quark with Maginus data took just three months, compared to 12 months in the past, and Trilanco expects the process to be even quicker next time. The reduced time needed to input data into  Quark, and the improved accuracy from using automatic input from the central Maginus data store, reduced the cost of the catalogue production by £25,000, about 40%.

Maginus' data import and export capabilities have also improved the process of introducing new products to the Trilanco range. In the past, when Trilanco found a new supplier, the time and effort it took to manually set up new products meant the company would typically only carry the top 10 or 20 products. Now, using Maginus' dataload facilities, Trilanco can simply import product information directly into Maginus which allows them to take on full product ranges rather than selected products. "Setting up new products used to be a nightmare. With Maginus it's very simple, we can carry any products our customers need and update the portfolio quickly and accurately", said Gary Molloy.

Improvements in warehousing have been one of the biggest benefits of Trilanco's Maginus implementation. Maginus consultancy helped Trilanco optimise its warehousing operation - for example, by changing stock locations and equipment to maximise efficiency. As a result, stock is located where it should be, which means fewer picking errors, and products with specialist requirements (such as vaccines, which must be refrigerated) can be controlled and tracked automatically. "We've reduced picking errors by 30% and reduced the number of customer returns as a result," said Gary Molloy. "And we've increased picking speed at the same time. For example, now we move seasonal products forward to the pick face at the right time, and it's all automated by Maginus. With Maginus' help we've reduced warehousing errors overall, which means better customer service and increased profitability."

"Another important benefit is the vastly improved stock information Maginus gives us," said Gary Molloy. "We can hold less stock while still improving the percentage of orders fulfilled from the warehouse, and reducing the number of back orders, which have fallen by 50% since Maginus went live. Stock counting is also much quicker with Maginus. We've reduced the time it takes from 2-3 days to less than one day."

Maginus' open design and unique eXtensible Architecture is particularly useful for companies, like Trilanco, which have their own in-house development expertise. Trilanco has achieved a great deal using standard Maginus functionality, but this can always be extended if the company needs more. "It's a big advantage to be able to write reports and plug-ins myself", said Gary Molloy. "If we need to extend Maginus' basic functionality, or just take advantage of something standard that we're not using yet, it's usually easy enough to do it in-house. Writing new reports is a straightforward process, and we can even write our own specialised report plug-ins using Maginus' eXtensible Architecture. When the business has new requirements, Maginus' flexible design makes it easy for us to respond."

Trilanco's future plans include introducing packing stations and barcoding in the warehouse, which should increase picking accuracy to as much as 98%; expanding the web site to take orders in Euros (using Maginus' multicurrency capabilities) and offering customer favourites, promotions and quantity breaks; and accepting payments by credit card, which is also handled by the standard Maginus product.

"Maginus' efficient and flexible design is playing a key role in the continued growth of our business", Gary Molloy concludes.