Staying ahead of the game

As Verbatim’s data storage business expands both globally and internationally, the company has partnered with Info Tech Accounting & Sage ACCPAC to standardise its reporting systems and streamline its growth...

Since its beginning in 1969, Verbatim has been at the forefront of the evolution in data storage technology. Today, more than 35 years later, Verbatim remains one of the most recognisable names in the data storage industry and is an international market leader in the distribution of optical and magnetic media, computer hardware and computer consumables.

Established in 1980, Verbatim Australia is a customer-driven organisation, which prides itself on adding considerable product value – above and beyond its competitors – to media technology. As an industry pioneer, Verbatim is recognised for the role it plays in early product development and commercial product introduction of new technologies.

The company’s leadership role is especially apparent in the evolution of optical media recording including MO and the CD/DVD family of products.

The challenge of growth
Like many businesses before it, Verbatim has found that while growth is the positive result of a job done well, it also presents organisations with a host of related challenges – particularly in the area of information gathering and reporting.

With new offices opening in India and China, the Australian and Asian Pacific arms of the company continue to grow – requiring the deployment of business systems that are robust and scalable, yet flexible enough to meet the unique requirements of the business.

Verbatim Asia Pacific general manager Paul Johnson explains; “As our business grows larger, becomes more complicated and we expand into more products, we need to analyse our business better. Also, as we globalise with new operations in new regions, to reduce the complexity we need to become more consistent in the way we do things.”

Sage Business partner Info Tech Accounting was first engaged by Verbatim some eight years ago to implement an integrated financial and e-commerce solution. Johnson says his company’s previous mainframe computer system was “large, old, and woefully inadequate for a marketing and distribution company as big as ours”. A priority for Verbatim at the time was to make the best use of emerging internet technologies to assist the company with its marketing and technical support.

“Our ebusiness strategy was to help us provide our network of distributors and resellers with a 24-hour virtual store of information,” says Johnson, “to improve both our staff and customer’s productivity, allowing us to get ahead of the competition.”

Setting the standards
To achieve this goal Verbatim looked at many different solution providers. A number of local products were considered but discarded because they were not SQL supportive and had no links to the internet. Other competitive products were considered not quite ready for market, and Verbatim had major concerns about the level of support it would receive.

“We were looking for new ways to move forward,” says Johnson. “We wanted a partnership with a company that not only had the product, but was also progressive and had the infrastructure already in place to provide the support we need. Sage ACCPAC had all of these things. The competitors were just not up there.”

With Info Tech and Sage ACCPAC in place, Johnson says the relationship between the two organisations has continued to grow. “We’ve most probably never engaged Info Tech more than in the last few years,” he says. “We’re doing a lot of work at the moment – escalating what our systems can do, as well as introducing a new data warehouse and a CRM solution.” And as the company grows, Johnson says uniformity of process is now critical to a business that is operating globally.

“We are standardising our business systems and processes across all our operating regions. Sage Accpac is the tool we’re using to ensure consistency in the way we do things. So someone working in Australia could go to work in India, without having to be retrained or use the system differently”.

The initiative to standardise improves the quality and consistency of information across the entire enterprise, says Johnson. Without it, the numbers and the way performance results are measured could come out differently from region to region. “The data warehouse solution gives us greater tools to make comparisons,” he says, “therefore, we need to make sure everyone is doing things in a similar way and the way information is entered into the system is standardised.”

Measuring success
With these new projects Verbatim have adopted a staged approach, implementing and testing each piece of the overall solution before moving onto the next. Johnson says the advantage of this approach is that results are consistently being achieved without too many disruptions to the business. Currently, Verbatim is implementing Sage CRM to manage internal communications, relationships and reporting – improving their internal process – and thus improving communications with all stakeholders in the organisation. “One of the biggest issues companies have is communicating and specifically, communicating useful information,” says Johnson.

“At the same time there’s also a lot of communication of useless information. With CRM we aim to able to identify what is the most useful information and the most relevant audience, so decisions can be made quickly and alerts generated when necessary”. As their use of CRM expands, he says greater accountability and better communications across the whole organisation will be the main outcomes.

“With CRM, if someone sends an enquiry it is flagged – someone has to do something about. If not, it is escalated and an alert is generated to flag that action as outstanding.”

As they move ahead Verbatim is looking forward to a host of improvements from the range of projects they’re implementing. By expanding their Accpac ERP implementation and the data warehouse solution, the company is experiencing greater productivity and standardisation across the enterprise, while greater consistency in information is generating more accurate reports and analysis of the organisation. In many areas of the business, for example, efficiency gains of 30 per cent have been achieved. But when looking at the potential benefits of better communication and greater analysis of the business over years, the returns start to become immeasurable. To achieve what Verbatim has achieved required a partner they can trust. “We’ve been very happy with Info Tech,” says Johnson, “we find them fair and honest, the know the products very well, and are very patient.”

For more information
0800 904 409
sales.pacific@sage.com

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