K3 fits like a glove for BM Polyco

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: K3 fits like a glove for BM Polyco.

BM Polyco, one of Europe's largest technical glove manufacturers, has embarked on a business data project with K3 to gain a 'single view of the customer', which will enable the company to provide more of a personalised customer service through better business efficiencies and visibility.

The company selected K3 to deliver Microsoft CRM and BI solutions, with the system scheduled to go-live in April 2013. The solutions will integrate with the core back-office system, enabling the capture and documentation of customer information and correspondents for data analysis.

Gerrard Shuttleworth, Business Service Director, at BM Polyco, says, "This project is about helping our business better understand and generate new opportunities in the existing market. Through the analysis of sales patterns and other critical business data, we are able to identify products that are selling well in a particular market sector and then compare it to a product that might not be fulfilling its potential."

He continues, "Accessing this type of data will enable us to create new insights into subsets of clients and target them with more personalised marketing campaigns, in turn increasing product awareness and sales."

Microsoft CRM will enable BM Polyco to retain more detail on; customer engagement, isolating problems and gaining insight on how these are resolved. In turn, this enables them to create a comprehensive picture of the customer and better understand their needs. This is complemented by BI, which provides a consistent set of reporting tools that allow the company to centrally manage internal reports, providing 'consistency of data' across business divisions.

The BI application will eventually run on an i-Pad, providing easy access to reports and other client information for staff in the field, improving not only sales but supply chain performance. Over time, the end-to-end system will be able to analyse and drill down into specific business costs and sales generated through particular suppliers.

John Little, Sales Director at K3, added, "This is an exciting time to be working with BM Polyco and we are pleased to have been selected as their partner on this project. The capabilities of Microsoft CRM and BI combined will not only improve core business process over time, but also support organic company growth."

To present data to BM Polyco in a user-friendly manner K3 used a presentation tool from its partner TargIT, which interacts with the data warehouse and BI data Cubes from K3, to create easy to access and modify presentations. This enables BM Polyco to better understand what is going on within the company through business forecasts, so they can respond accordingly, as well as deliver reports with relevance to all levels in the company.

Gerrard Shuttleworth, Business Service Director, at BM Polyco, said, "We selected K3 because of their deep understanding of our business requirements, teamed with their on-going support of core Microsoft systems, which gave us confidence in their capability to deliver. This partnership is seen as a long-term investment, to not only deliver but maintain and develop our critical business solutions."