Jasnor

Noel Thurlow, MD of Jasnor, had for a long time considered arming his sales agents with some type of smart ordering system. He knew the days of paper order forms were numbered and he understood how inefficient it was for his and Sherrie Thurlow’s ever-growing giftware business.

At the time of the 2003 Melbourne Gift Fair he thought it would be opportune to show the system he was considering to his agents while they were all in Melbourne for the Gift Fair. He knew his business relied on the work of the agents and their acceptance of a new system was extremely important. Their response was very favourable, so the decision was made soon after to implement the MiniSell Sales Force Automation package.

The rollout of the program to the sales agents commenced in December 2003. Instead of paper order forms they were given HP Ipaq 2210 Pocket PCs loaded with the MiniSell program. They were now able to view details of all their customers, products, sales history and forward/back orders as well as create new orders while in the sales call. At the end of the day they download their orders via the Internet and receive an update data package of customers and stock.

We asked Noel how his agents adapted to the new technology. Noel replied:

“It really wasn’t an issue. After the first few days they get very used to the program and the method of entering orders. Because MiniSell is much more than just a field ordering system, the agents can see the status of outstanding orders for their customers, stock availability and even future availability dates. The need for them to ring head office to find these things out is reduced because they have this information already in their hand!”

By January 2004 all Jasnor agents were using MiniSell just in time for the all-important Sydney Gift Fair in February. Trade fairs were one of the main reasons that Noel wanted a smart ordering system.

Like many other giftware companies at a trade fair, Jasnor take hundreds of orders in a very short space of time. Previously they had to have all these orders keyed at the end of the fair, which could take weeks to finish and then ship the orders. Now they are shipping orders on Monday that were taken on the Saturday and Sunday at a fair, while the fair still may have another 3 days to go. Of course the sooner an order gets to a store the more chance it has of selling and being re-ordered, in some cases before the original order would have even arrived in.

The other advantage of Minisell at a trade fair is what MiniSell call “Exhibition mode”. By downloading the orders from the Minisell handheld users into a laptop, the exhibition mode program can report on all the orders taken instantly so at any point in time Noel will know how the fair is going financially. Noel stated:

“In past fairs it was Sherrie’s job at the end of the day to add up all the day’s orders and this would take many hours with a calculator. Now we know instantly how we are tracking.”

So instead of adding up order values at the end of each day they can relax and get ready for the next day’s onslaught!

Following success of this at the Sydney fair, the Toy Fair and the Melbourne Gift Fair, Noel decided to spread the usage offshore to his NZ agents in time for the Auckland Gift fair in October 2004. This proved another instant success and Noel now has all of his Australian and NZ agents using Minisell to send their orders each day directly to their Melbourne head office.

Each morning at the start of business the orders are sitting waiting to be imported into Jasnor’s MYOB system. They import exactly the way the agents entered them with no need to double key an order already created by an agent in the store.

The beauty of the system is that it will integrate with any order processing system – in fact it doesn’t touch it – they just exchange files in a secure environment.

Many of Noel’s suppliers in the UK are also using Minisell and this helps assure Noel he has made the right decision.