Allied Carpets aims to increase its revenue by as much
as £5m a year with a new IT architecture and a Microsoft customer
relationship management system.
The business growth will come from improved customer services,
the company said. In particular, it will help Allied Carpets to
handle its many insurance industry customers, which often have more
detailed needs than the firm's retail customers.
The company also aims to reduce the cost of managing its IT
systems with the move to a centralised architecture. It previously
held consumer and trading information on servers in each of it
stores as well as running a PC-based point of sale system. The new
centralised system is based on IBM Intel servers at Allied's
Orpington headquarters.
Microsoft's Terminal Services and Remote Desktop Protocol allow
the firm to run Windows applications from the head office servers
to thin clients in its stores.
The project, managed by IBM business partner Panacea Services,
began as a seven-store pilot in August 2005. It has now been rolled
out to all of Allied's 222 UK stores.
The company will use Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 to manage
relationships with customers. Although Microsoft is relatively new
to the CRM market, Ken Moss, IT controller at Allied Carpets, said
staff were happy with the feel of the product during piloting,
largely because of its similarity to Outlook.
For the IT department, the system should make it easier to
integrate CRM with other Microsoft products, including Active
Directory, Windows 2003, SQL databases and Exchange 2000, Moss
said.
Because thin clients use less power than previous in-store
systems, Allied Carpets expects to save £70,000 a year on its
electricity bill.
The choice of Microsoft-based systems initially raised some
eye-brows among Allied Carpets' French owners. "There was some
scepticism," Moss said. "They mainly run IBM AS/400s and open
source software. But in the end we had a lot of support from
them.
"For the next three to six months we will be bedding in, and
then increase corporate business and retail sales. We have already
had a lot of interest from insurance companies wanting to work with
us on linking systems."
The new system also allowed sales reps to log on from any site,
away from the home branch, and offered more up-to-date management
reports, Moss said.
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