Many suppliers to the travel industry held back when the rest of
the sector rushed to embrace e-business. But now one supplier,
Design Go, has set up an online B2B marketplace for travel products
and accessories.
We all know by heart the case for grabbing early-adopter advantage
in the field of corporate IT; but sometimes there's a lot to be
said for a little initial reticence.
Just ask Glenn Rogers, operations director of travel industry
supplier Design Go, which sells travel accessories such as
inflatable pillows and luggage to companies in more than 30
countries. He oversees IT and strategic development of Design Go
and says that when the company first looked into the benefits that
new technology and e-business could bring it failed to find a
compelling argument.
"We couldn't see the value in just putting a catalogue of goods
online," Rogers says. "It would've been great five years ago to
have a fully functional Web site but to what end?"
The idea went on the backburner until nearly two years ago when the
company came across a product from Dragnet, a supplier of
e-business software and systems to the small- and medium-sized
enterprise (SME) market.
"When we saw what it could do it piqued our interest and we
realised it was worth investing in," says Rogers, and the idea of
an online business-to-business (B2B) marketplace for travel
accessories was born.
Having taken this long, Design Go was not going to lose its head
and rush into an e-business foray. It presented Dragnet with a
dataflow description of what it wanted and "had a plan down from
day one". The system had to be tailored to its needs, it had to be
future-proof.
The Dragnet product was originally geared towards the
business-to-consumer market. So Design Go worked with the company
to develop bespoke functionality and tune it to its B2B
requirements. "We knew what our customers wanted," says Rogers.
He says the Web site is designed from a user's perspective. A
multi-locational ordering system was built in to allow clients to
place orders for each of their outlets on a single order form,
although the orders arrive at Design Go individually. The company
also wanted to give store managers more autonomy in placing orders.
It was decided that managers would be allowed to order from the
variety of goods on display, using a password. However, the
password parameters are pre-set by the client company's senior
buyer, thus reducing maverick spend, says Rogers.
Buyers can order according to quantity or in pallets, however, the
system automatically rounds the order up or down to the nearest
pallet size. "The difference at our end in terms of processing that
order is huge," says Rogers. "It's a big win."
Not only does it save the company from the physical process of
going through picking bins to assemble orders, it is more efficient
and cheaper to send out full pallets than partial ones.
Another function is the two-tier ordering process. New customers
can see pictures of the 200 products on offer and access
information but for more established customers who know what they
want there is a "fast track" version.
Rogers says there was little or no competition to the Dragnet
option. "They understood what we wanted to achieve and gave us
confidence that it could be achieved," he adds. "And it worked very
well."
Dragnet also made sure that the graphical front-end designed by
Fusion Advertising and Design could be embedded into the product.
A prototype was up and running in the first week of February 2000,
in time to be showcased at the Birmingham International Spring Fair
- a major event in the industry's calendar - and Rogers says the
response from small, medium and large retailers was very positive.
Heartened by this response, the company moved to get its
international distributors using the system. As customer
information was already held in the Pegasus Opera accounting
system, existing customers could set up on the system almost
instantaneously. And the number of glitches experienced by the
distributors was minimal, because of the amount of integrity
testing done beforehand by Rogers' team, who had "battered it to
death" before it went live.
Not all of the company's distributors went live straightaway and
some smaller companies are still not using it, preferring the more
familiar world of phones and faxes. Rogers points out that the
industry is rather traditional and conservative and says the
take-up was relative to their "degree of comfort with technology".
But Rogers claims that those firms that did use it found it
"extremely beneficial". As an added incentive to use the system,
customers ordering over the Web receive packing priority.
About one month later the company started publicising the system to
all its customers. However, on top of the reluctance of some of the
smaller customers, it found that some of the larger customers
already had e-commerce systems and their back-office systems would
not integrate with it. So the company decided to target independent
retailers - the "one man bands". Then came the smaller SMEs.
Rogers believes that in the future much of the integration and
interoperability problems will be resolved, allowing it to get the
remainder of its bigger customers on board.
Design Go has spent £35,000 on the system so far but Rogers says
the system will not require any major changes for about five years.
And it has already generated cost savings. For example, large
pallet orders that previously could have taken around two weeks to
prepare can now be prepared in a couple of days.
However, Rogers is keen to point out that saving money is not the
only way to measure the success. "It's the learning curve for
preparing ourselves for what will come next that is the real value
of the project, not the money we'll save. The real benefits will
probably come in the years ahead," explains Rogers.