Contact Manager Case Studies - VEKA plc

VEKA plc are part of a worldwide multi-national group - VEKA AG - one of the world's leading manufacturers of PVCu profile for the window industry.

Based in Burnley VEKA plc has around 100 internal staff and 30 outbased personnel who service the various customer functions.

Double 6 provides a whole range of services to VEKA including Notes / Domino development & consultancy skills. VEKA's main internal non financial administration system is based upon Contact Manager

VEKA had a number of very specific business requirements which have been dealt with by way of custom modules added to Contact Manager as follows:

Commercial Enquiries – a module that allows internal sales staff to receive and record an enquiry from a third party, search and nominate customers based upon defined criteria and notify both the enquirer and the nominated customer by auto generated fax.

Incoming Delivery Scheduling – all deliveries to VEKA must be booked into this module which is viewable by the company’s security staff in a simple calendar like display. On arrival the security lodge simply tick a box to record the fact that the third party is on site. This module also auto faxes the third party with details of their “time slot” on creation.

Shortage Notification – a module that allows the easy creation of a fax to a customer notifying them of items not available for delivery.

Customer Order Reminder – VEKA customers have a defined order / delivery deadline. Despite the fact that all customers are aware of the deadlines daily reminders are still necessary. This module allows quick selection of relevant customers and auto generates and sends an appropriate fax. Previously this task was done by hand written faxes fed through a paper based fax machine.

The benefits – prior to implementing Contact Manager there was poor communication between the outbased sales staff and the internal office particularly in areas such as pricing changes. Frequently the accounts department would find it necessary to retrospectively alter a customers prices simply because they had not been “copied in” on a key letter to a customer. After implementation of Contact Manager this simply does not happen – any letter from sales to a customer is always copied to the relevant party and always easily accessible in the case of query. The commercial enquiries process was previously done entirely by hand and estimated to take up 40 man hours a month. Using the special Contact Manager module the task, including monthly reporting, has been reduced to just a few key strokes per enquiry. A similar time saving has occurred with both Shortage Notification & Customer Order Reminder modules.