Customers

Case Study - Sue Stedman

Sue Stedman Limited is an owner-managed corporate clothing provider that has been trading successfully since 1989.

Following a period of steady and continued growth, it became clear that the company had outgrown its existing Sage computer systems and they decided to look for a specialist clothing industry package, with some specific requirements in mind.

Customer service has always been paramount to Sue Stedman, but compiling accurate information was becoming ever more time-consuming and responding quickly, was increasingly more difficult. Any new system would have to provide fast and easy access to accurate, up-to-date information about stock, expected deliveries, expected despatches, existing orders and historical information.

After six months of evaluating systems, in the summer of 2002, Sue Stedman chose leading clothing industry specialist Prima Solutions.

Streamline processes

Implementing the Order Management and Information Management modules from Prima Solutions has enabled Sue Stedman to streamline their business processes to more effectively manage the order process and be more responsive to their customers' requirements.

"It was important for us to show our customers how we were progressing and to be proactive in giving them more information about their corporate clothing," said Teresa Stedman, Business Development Manager at Sue Stedman. "Our customers' needs are changing and we need to be geared up to meet those needs. For example, we now offer a more sophisticated distribution service. Where we used to deliver orders to one location at one point in time (and sometimes still do), now when our customers have placed an order we can call them off from stock as required and send the stock to the location where it is needed using the system. We needed to be able to manage that effectively and provide our customers with the information they want monthly as well as on an ad hoc basis."

"The team was working flat out," said Teresa. "The existing manual systems were fine for 'off the peg' accounts where we are able to supply catalogue stock tailored for our customers. But managing the bespoke clothing through this system was getting more and more difficult. Only one individual knew the situation of each account, which meant heavily relying on that individual and we were unable to give our customers a fast response to their enquiries."

Customers benefit

Four long standing customers that will begin to reap the benefits of Sue Stedman's investment over the next few months are Allders, Aviance, Berkley Homes and Bryant Homes. These companies receive monthly reports on what stock has been called off and what stock is available to help them manage their corporate clothing more effectively and budget for the future.

"This new system is so flexible. We can help our customers with forecasting their corporate clothing and look at costs and 'what if' scenarios to help them manage their budgets. Being able to hold order and stock information centrally, have such easy access to it and be able to produce comprehensive reports makes us more efficient and really supports the relationship with our customers."

Strengthen the backbone

Sue Stedman realised investing in a fully integrated system would strengthen the backbone of the business and support their business development. It has proved to provide the infrastructure needed to grow.

"We needed to take this leap forward. We are using the expertise of the people at Prima Solutions to fine tune our processes. We have not tailored the software to meet our existing manual processes because we felt that the use of an integrated system would create a more productive environment than before. So we had to make some compromises, learning to work in a slightly different way, and we are really benefiting from it."

"One of our aims is to free up time for both myself and John Whippy, our Commercial Director," explains Teresa. "We were spending so much time administering our customer accounts that we were beginning to neglect the ongoing needs of the business. We wanted to be able to offer our customers a more advanced customer service yet have more time to develop the business."

Quality relationship

Having researched and selected Prima Solutions, John Whippy admits, "Their system is comprehensive and full of functionality so for the first few years we probably won't use it to its full extent but we know it will continue to meet our growing needs as a business. This was one of the reasons why we chose Prima Solutions as our IT provider. The software simply outshines every other system on the market - it was the only one that hit the mark."

John continues, "Our relationship with Prima Solutions is excellent. In the early stages we identified areas of the software that could be developed to meet the closer needs of corporate clothing companies. Prima Solutions listened to us and introduced our ideas into the standard solution. Would I recommend Prima Solutions and their software? I would whole-heartedly. It is a fantastic system and the people at Prima Solutions are genuine and helpful. We have had great support throughout. We're all really impressed."

John Norman, Managing Director at Prima Solutions, is delighted with the feedback from the team at Sue Stedman. "It is important to us that we listen to our customers and develop our solution to meet the needs of the industry. Sue Stedman is a company with a future that looks very bight and we will do what we can to support them and help them succeed."