If you are planning your marriage, you can do no better than to contact BelArto. This go-ahead company specialises in providing personalised wedding accessories including printed invitations, place names, order of service cards, gifts and various wedding accessories. The Nottingham based company is a joint venture between several large European greeting card manufacturers and was established to provide a sales and fulfilment centre in the UK.
BelArto sell their high quality goods by direct mail order via their website (www.specialdaydirect.co.uk) and by brochure. Retail Wedding and Christmas product ranges being available from September 2005.
When it came to deciding on a software package, BelArto knew their business requirements were somewhat special. Eric Hobson, Operations Director said “While there were plenty of packages that could process the fulfilment of standard items, we needed functionality that could handle the data collection and personalisation aspects of our business. For example, to provide wedding invitations, the sales order processing staff must collect a wide range of information including bride and groom’s name, parents name, venue, date and wording from a choice of message templates. Once this information is noted, the next complication is the large selection of options for the customer to choose such as paper, font, style, colour, size, quantity etc. Some of these options involve additional charges. Of course all of this information then needs to be transferred to production to provide instructions for manufacture and fulfilment”.
“We needed to find a mail order system that could process orders quickly and efficiently and be installed in time for the wedding season. The final challenge was a tight timescale for implementation; especially as we were unlikely to find exactly what we wanted off-the-shelf.”
Bruce Leigh, Trilogy’s business analyst immediately saw the potential in developing this new functionality and Trilogy produced a module in the Trilogy Commerce Manager software that can be configured to collect any customer data and handle any multi-option product.
“This new module makes the Commerce Manager suitable for any business that requires a degree of personalisation such as personalised gifts, tee-shirt suppliers, printers, calendar production and sign writers.”
Trilogy are particularly excited about the potential of generic data collection integrated into sales order processing. Many companies want to profile their customer base better. An obvious example is offering customers some benefit to join their “club” or participation in a prize draw in exchange for customer information which could then use for marketing profiling purposes. For example, if you get a shipment of left-handed widgets, you can imagine the marketing value of knowing who is left handed on your customer database.
“In the end” Eric Hobson said, “After looking at a fair number of packages, we chose Trilogy because they not only understood our needs, but we had confidence they had the developers to provide the functionality for our more unusual requirements. Apart from the initial development, we wanted to establish a long-term relationship with Trilogy for future ongoing development.” Eric concluded “We have been very happy with the implementation process and final delivery; the installation went live in July 2005 without a hitch.”