“It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.”
Jonathan Ive, Chief Design Officer, Apple
When it comes to scaling your drinks business, the above quote is partly true. Changing your ERP software may be a necessary transformation, but you have to get it right. Otherwise, your performance won’t be any better. A change in software does not guarantee improvement across your business. Change does not mean better. Change does not guarantee scalable growth.
When you’re picking new ERP software, you need to understand how this technology can help you to achieve the growth you need and facilitate your entry into new markets. An ‘off the shelf’ product won’t work.
So, Gaina Software has put together a short list of features from our software and services that we know can help you to make business improvements in relation to growth and scalability.
1 – Cloud-Based Software
With Gaina’s cloud-based ERP software, you only pay for the space you need, acquiring more as you grow. Such a provision enables you to seamlessly introduce new users and staff members when needs be. Our system monitoring software ensures that you never run out of server space. Meaning you have the peace of mind that you can grow your business seamlessly in relation to user numbers.
2 – CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
Gaina’s Control-IT product, which is our main ERP data system, holds all of your customer information, such as account details, transactional history, communications, orders, credit limits and more. Hosting all of this customer information allows your telesales staff and filed sales reps to manage their time, manage customer expectations and manage orders in a paperless environment.
We enable your office staff and telesales teams to send text messages and emails to customers in relation to their account and products, meaning that payments are made on time while creating further advertising and promotional channels to help increase sales. You can reinvest that increased turnover into your business.
3 – Analytics
‘The price of light is less than the cost of darkness.’ Arthur Nielsen makes a great point that can be related to investing in web and business analytics. In a world full of data, anyone who fails to make the financial, time and personnel investment into analytics will pay a bigger price when they fall behind competitors and miss their quarterly and annual business targets.
Gaina Software’s Business Intelligence package lets team members and management create and distribute dynamic reports in relation to people, goods and processes. Track items from their entry to your warehouse until they reach the door of a customer. Compare sales rep, promotion and financial performance across geography and product range, enabling you to make more strategic business decisions. Business Intelligence ensures that your business decisions are intelligent, and generate the growth that you demand.
4 – Automation
When going through a recent sales process with a customer, we discovered that an office manager was spending 20 hours per week formulating sales, finance and warehouse reports. She had to retrieve information from different databases, manually import data into a variety of spreadsheets, create numerous visual charts and send those reports to the relevant people.
Occasionally, by the time the information reached its target, the information was obsolete. Gaina’s automated analytics and reporting function is now saving 19 hours of her time every week. (912 hours per year). She now uses the time she’d saved to help sales reps to generate new business and to help warehousing staff with training requirements. Gaina enables your office, finance and warehouse staff to automate reporting, direct debiting, warehouse counts and much, much more. Automation helps your staff to use their time more strategically and increase your bottom line.
5 – Digitisation
Recently, Browne Forman realised that in order to continue their growth, they needed to digitise part of their ordering processes.
Dani Hepperlin, Brown Forman’s Digital Manager, said, ‘We needed to make it easy for our business customers to place orders when they wanted, on the device of their choosing.’
They developed an eCommerce site and were able to take orders from the 30,000 ‘hard to reach’ customers that they had previously identified.
Gaina Software can provide you with an eCommerce platform so that you too can generate orders every hour of the week from remote locations.
On the platform, you can push bespoke promotions to selected customers and generate repeat orders. More importantly, you\’ll decrease your cost per sale. The web portal allows your reps and office staff the time to concentrate on building relationships and winning new business.
6 – Customer Experience Management
Many other software companies may refer to this service as ‘Support.’
Support can be identified as a service that kicks in when something goes wrong or if a customer is experiencing difficulties. Gaina Software does offer helpdesk support, and we do so with an average CSAT rating of 4.8/5.
But we’re different.
Every customer is assigned a Customer Experience Manager, who will work proactively to offer industry insights and to provide you and your staff with ongoing training.
What’s more, Gaina Software gives you the ability to influence our product development roadmap. Our software develops with your requirements.
Our mobile sales app, ORCA, was developed at a current customer’s request, and is now available to all Gaina customers! Our ability to alter and develop our software helps your business to grow in an ever-changing market. A privilege not offered to users of generic ERP platforms.
So, let’s go back to the start. Jonathan Ive said, ‘it’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.’
We said that was only partly true. The truth is that with Gaina Software, being better isn’t difficult.
We’ve already has 36 years’ success of producing ERP software and scalable solutions for the drinks industry. We make our software fit your business. Our implementation process is conducted by professionals with over 20 years’ experience in drinks industry-specific IT project management. We’ll provide training every step of the way to ensure that you work smarter, with better results.
We’re already looking forward to watching your business grow. Maybe someday you can be a case study in the same way Brown Forman is…
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