Edgetech streamlines order processing with Intellisell
Coventry based manufacturer Edgetech is part of the US group Quanex Building Products. It supplies the glazing industry with industry leading, insulating glass spacers.
Edgetech’s growing customer base has traditionally emailed or faxed its orders to the Edgetech customer services team, but following a wide-ranging research project, completed in 2018, Charlotte Mercer, Head of Marketing at Edgetech, embarked on a more efficient way for its customers to place their orders. Charlotte explains: “Customer research identified that customers felt our pricing and ordering facilities were outdated, and would prefer if they were more automated.”
Edgetech was using spreadsheets to record and manage pricing and relied on the experience of its customer services team to accurately check and calculate the details for each order. Discounts were manually calculated based on quantity breaks or customer-specific pricing structures. Edgetech’s customer services team would have to add up the quantity of products on each order, then manually calculate if they needed to apply a discount resulting in a very labour intensive process and one open to human error.
Addressing the customer feedback Charlotte began to review potential ecommerce systems and she narrowed it down to two solutions. “We looked at a bespoke solution that offered some integration into our existing Sage 200 business software, but realised that there was a lot behind the scenes that needed to connect up correctly in order for the two systems to work well together. Intellisell had already done the hard work and offered out of the box integration to our order-processing system.”
Intellisell has been built specifically to integrate with Sage, negating high risk, costly integration services. Intellisell could also be customised with the same look and feel as the Edgetech website to create a corporate front end. “Intellisell is already set up to use with Sage 200 and we felt that it would get us up and running quicker.”
In May 2019 Edgetech exhibited at the FIT show, the UK’s largest glazing industry trade show. It was the ideal opportunity to celebrate 30 years of its product Super Spacer, introduce an innovative new rigid spacer bar and give its customers the chance to trial the new Intellisell ecommerce system. Charlotte explains, “Intellisell was one of the key things we were launching there as a wider initiative to put customers at the centre of our organisation. We wanted to make dealing with us as easy as we possibly can. Exhibitions are such a great opportunity to get in front of prospects and customers to get feedback, as such we pushed hard to get the Intellisell website up and running for that show”.
Charlotte was pleased to find that customers responded positively to the new online ordering system. “They will be able to log into Intellisell 24/7 through our website, accessing their own specific prices, exactly as they are set up in Sage. The quantity breaks will be calculated automatically too, allowing customers more flexibility to access these cost savings. The system is so easy to use that I can see a time when our customer services team will use the system internally to place orders, even if a customer wants to order through their traditional route. We believe that it will be more efficient and help remove human error from the process.”
The glazing industry is very competitive and the market is continuously evolving. Edgetech is leading innovation in research and development and it is constantly adding to its core product and ancillary ranges. Charlotte has been speaking to the Intellisell team about extending the functionality of Intellisell by highlighting complementary products to its clients during the ordering process. “I’m certain that moving forwards, Intellisell will generate additional ancillary sales and help to increase our revenue.”
