UK manufacturer of play equipment to deploy advanced CRM to become leaner and more responsive to new opportunities
UK manufacturer of play equipment to deploy advanced CRM to become leaner and more responsive to new opportunities
Microsoft-focused business technology specialist, K3 has announced a new Microsoft Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) project with SMP Playgrounds, a UK designer and installer of play equipment, which will significantly reduce repetitive manual data entry and integrate with financial, manufacturing and project management systems as the firm streamlines its business during a period of strong growth.
With over 50 years' experience, SMP Playgrounds offers a range of products and services aimed at fostering the physical and social development of all children, putting their needs and enjoyment foremost when creating play facilities. With headquarters and manufacturing in the UK, the firm supports a network of sales offices in over 40 countries.
Capitalising on growth
“We have had strong growth over the last year and we felt that now would be a good time to capitalise on our position and re-engineer some of our processes to make our company more efficient,” explained Steve Sylvester, SMP Playgrounds managing director.
SMP has experienced a 20% increase in sales over the previous year and exports over a quarter of its equipment with a range of end-to-end services including consulting, design, installation and maintenance.
“At our current rate of growth, we would need to have employed several more administration staff to deal with the work load but with the implementation of the new CRM and improvements to our workflows, we expect to reduce the amount of repetitive and time consuming tasks and help add value to other activities,” he added.
Programme of process improvement
Sylvester highlighted additional benefits, including closer integration into the quote generation and sales order processing systems with improved reporting for better targeting of marketing activities. K3 said Microsoft Dynamics CRM has a number of powerful capabilities like workflow automation and analytics, to help sales, marketing and service teams easily share information and route tasks to provide a seamless customer experience.
“We selected K3 based on the impressive level of knowledge they exhibited throughout the tender process and during our recent business re-engineering exercise, they have helped us define and improve our processes ahead of the implementation of the new software” Sylvester added.
