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Accentra Webshop Manager for Interspares UK Ltd

Accentra helps Interspares (UK) Limited to automate the entire Sales & Purchase Order and Account processing by seamlessly integrating the powerful Accentra Enterprise solution with the company's on-line store.

Interspares (UK) Limited specialises in buying and selling spares parts for domestic appliances such as Washing Machines, Dish Washers and other kitchen equipment. When Simon Martin founded the company 3 years ago, he little realised how soon the demand was going to outgrow his organisation's capacity. With over 10,000 spare parts to handle, the prices changing dynamically every month, his staff were constantly engaged in doing routine tasks leaving little time to focus on growing the business further.

When Accentra approached Interspares in Dec 2004, following issues were analysed:

• The company relied on a HTML based on-line store that generated tele-sales enquiries & sales.
• Too much time was spent on keying in sales orders
• Considerable amount of time was spent in creating purchase orders.
• Too much time and resources were spent on picking orders for delivery each day.
• Excess inventory cost.
• A separate set of entries were required to be input into QuickBooks accounting system.

Lack of resources lead to loss of tele-sales opportunities. Despite the increasing demand, the business couldn't grow further. The fragmented system became a bottleneck for the growth.

The solution seemed to be obvious - an integrated system that encompassed everything from the "on-line store" down to the "cash book" system. However there was none in the market that addressed all the above issues within the budget.

"The web-integration, the requirement to support large numbers of spare parts, appliance types, models, manufacturers etc. meant that we needed an enterprise solution running on MS-SQL database or equivalent. Given the budget limit of £10K there were not many options in the market" - says Simon Martin, the Managing Director of Interspares, "And the few available options had to be quickly ruled out as they failed to address the unique nature of the spare parts industry".

The spare part industry often requires identifying the same part number under different appliances/models. For example, the same Gasket can be used for different models or even appliances. Most of the on-line shoppers have the habit of searching for the part number for a specificappliance/model. This meant, multiple records of the same part number had to be maintained on the on-line store database. And yet, every order processing application in the market insisted on having a unique product id. Using a separate field for the part number was not an option as it ruled out the web integration possibility, as the orders had to be processed based on part numbers.

But Accentra had little trouble in coping with any of these demands. Quickly a plan was put in place for the integration with a new on-line store running on MY-SQL database (developed by Niddocks,UK).