Help from Chris Marsh of Synergy
"Synergy helped Perfect Settings with two projects:
1. On-Line Product Catalog Provides Significant Fuel Savings:
a. The first objective was to eliminate or reduce the need to send samples all around the Washington metro area.
As you can imagine Perfect Settings continues to buy product at a significant rate. They are constantly changing the inventory so a client wants to see the new product--the answer was to bubble wrap it and then put it in a truck and drive it across town. In some cases these trucks had just a sample because it was so important to the client that it might be the only thing on the truck or equally as bad, the client may never even see the new product so it wasn’t being rented.
b. Clearly, a printed catalog was not the solution; it would be out of date in a few months.
We created an on-line catalog that is 100 percent tied into their Synergy database. As Perfect Settings buys inventory we take a picture the photography room and it is entered into the Synergy database along with a picture of the item so it’s available for rental. They simply click a single checkbox to make it available for the 'on-line product catalog' so this catalog is real time, and they drastically reduced the need to send out samples on a separate truck wasting countless gallons of fuel.
2. Automated Order-Entry And Reduce The Faxes:
a. The next major IT objective was to provide order entry automation.
Remember the old days when you had faxes and faxes of orders. You entered your orders from the faxes by hand, then printed it and then faxed it back to the client. The client of course made changes, so the cycle would continue--more faxes, more paper, etc. At Perfect Settings, at one point they had faxes in just about everyone’s office for processing orders.
b. The solution that we came up with was to create an import tool for their largest clients.
The client would email the order to their Perfect Settings sales associate and Synergy then parses the email and automatically generate the order. Then, Synergy will automatically send an email to the sales person and the client that an order was automatically created with confirmation details and even potential questions about delivery, equipment items, etc. The operations department simply prints and fulfils the order. The automated process is nearly 100 percent accurate eliminating countless faxes, print jobs and wasted paper.
c. The last piece of this project was to allow the client to log in to the Perfect Settings Web site, look up their own orders on-line via their own event calendar (past or future events), preview their invoices, orders, even details about the job such as drivers, truck numbers and other delivery details. Again, reducing the need for faxes and printed emails and wasting paper."
