Marcrist

About Marcrist

Marcrist International Limited specialises in the production of diamond-based products for cutting and drilling. The company, seen as a technology leader in its field with its premium quality products, distributes to professional users through merchants and distributors.

Its Swiss owners established Marcrist in 1979; today the company is based in Doncaster, UK with additional sales teams operating in Germany and Switzerland.

IT Manager, Simon Johnson, who has been with Marcrist for ten years, is responsible for running all systems used within the business and directs the company’s overall IT strategy.

Simon explained that they had, 'migrated from our previous ERP system to a new sophisticated solution in 2012 but soon realised that although we had a better system to manage our sales processing and warehouse operations, we were still lacking in functionality around our growing CRM, sales and marketing activities.'

'There was a lot of double handling of information and duplication of work because our sales teams on the road in the UK, Germany and Switzerland had no remote access to the ERP system. Information about customer activity had to be emailed to the customer service team who then had to re-key it into the system which resulted in delays and the added risk of input errors,' he continued.

When Simon decided to look for a stand-alone, cloud based, sales focused CRM system that the sales team could access from wherever they were working; he also wanted a system that would enable self-sufficiency in the production of their own individual sales reports and analysis.

Before implementing Vecta, all our reporting, including sales analysis, was done in Excel. We had master reports set up in our ERP system but when a member of the sales team needed something specific for a customer meeting, it typically fell to me to write a query, pull the results into a spreadsheet and send it out to whoever needed it.

Everyone was reliant on me to do their bespoke reporting and it was taking up a lot of my time. The sales person then had to spend more time analysing the data within the report to extract the information they needed which in turn delayed any response to issues, queries or sales gaps.

Simon Johnson - IT Manager at Marcrist

Simon looked at other CRM systems before discovering Vecta but his main incentive to find out more about Vecta was how it was designed to integrate with an ERP system and combine in depth sales analysis with CRM.

Having those two features together within one application was a big driver for me as it meant that the sales team could use it to get sales information independently, with the added bonus of sales management functionality.

Simon Johnson - IT Manager at Marcrist

Results

My Director immediately said it was just what we had been looking for - it ticked all the boxes for us.

Simon Johnson - IT Manager at Marcrist

Implementation was handled by a Vecta Project Manager and, according to Simon, was a really smooth process. Three feeds from the ERP system now update transactional information into Vecta overnight for each of the British, German and Swiss operations. When the Marcrist sales team log on to Vecta each morning their individual dashboards are already populated with up to date sales information for their own customers, in their own language and currency.

Training on Vecta started with the German sales team and their early feedback helped fine tune the user dashboards, which Marcrist wanted to standardise across the three countries to provide a consistent view of information and enable all of the sales team to get straight to what they need. Response from the entire sales team has been really positive.

They are saving time not having to email updates to their managers and instead are now using just one system to capture information about visits and calls and how they plan to follow them up. And, rather than having to wait for a monthly email containing sales information, Vecta allows them to closely and continually monitor their own performance against target and shows them through gap analysis where there are sales opportunities.

In turn the management team now have complete visibility of the sales team’s activities within Vecta and can easily correlate these activities against sales. 

Simon said the Vecta team has been really easy to work with and had a good understanding right from the start what Marcrist wanted to achieve.

We felt like we were in good hands with Vecta, both from the sales side and then from our Project Manager who handled the implementation and planned the timescales. I’ve been involved in several implementations and migrations and compared to all of them the Vecta implementation was like a walk in the park!

 

And they’ve not just left us to it – the salesman who demonstrated the system recently called in to see how we’re getting on and if we could make any improvements. I feel like our decision to take on Vecta has been justified absolutely and it’s going to bring some great benefits to our company.

Simon Johnson - IT Manager at Marcrist