CUTTING-EDGE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE ALLOWS HALDANE FISHER TO ENHANCE THEIR CUSTOMER SERVICE

Established in 1946, family-run building and timber merchant Haldane Fisher pride themselves on continuously improving their business and providing outstanding customer service. For many years, the merchant has run K8 - the flagship ERP solution from Kerridge Commercial Systems (KCS) - as the core business management system to streamline their trading and finance management. As part of Haldane Fisher’s drive for continual improvement, they chose to implement Phocas to integrate with K8, allowing them to operate with enhanced business intelligence (BI) and improve the speed and quality of their decision-making across all areas of their operation.

Neal Boomer, Group Finance Director at Haldane Fisher explains how K8 has successfully driven many developments over the years as the system has grown. “The openness of K8 provided us with the means of becoming one of the first builders’ merchants in Northern Ireland to go live with a fully-functional and integrated eCommerce website, allowing customers to check stock availability across our branch network as and when they need to.”

Michelle McKee, Group Project Accountant at Haldane Fisher highlights how K8 is an intrinsic part of the business, “All transactions are processed through the system, and our staff use it daily for sales, purchasing, finance and stock management. Ultimately, K8 is at the heart of our day-to-day operations and has the capability to store huge amounts of data.”

To further enhance their customer offering and business efficiency, Haldane Fisher wanted to digitally transform and modernise their data management. Consequently, they recognised the benefits of taking the transaction and business data within K8 into the cloud-based Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics solution that is Phocas. Since the successful implementation, Haldane Fisher have been able to transform their data access with informative insights that enhance decisionmaking for the benefit of the company and their customers.

Michelle explains how Phocas helps them to efficiently analyse large volumes of data, “Phocas is a self-service system that’s fast and easy to use, empowering our staff to find the answers to questions immediately rather than waiting for weekly or monthly reports. This not only increases efficiency but also means staff have objective knowledge in an easily understandable, visual format, helping drive improvement in all areas across the business.”

Another improvement Haldane Fisher notice is the flexibility to distribute data, with up to date reports available to staff at a frequency of their choosing. From daily, to once a week or at month-end, such instinctive functionality creates enormous efficiencies. Michelle adds that using K8 and Phocas together offers significant advantages over K8 alone, before mentioning an unexpected benefit, “It’s a very visual piece of software, which makes it easier for you to see anomalies and outliers in a way you couldn’t so easily before.”

For further information please contact +353 (0) 1 5457100 or view www.kerridgecs.com