Olympic Fixings

About Olympic Fixings

Olympic Fixings was established in 1989 and operates from distribution centres in Ireland and the UK. The company supplies over 3,500 catalogued and stocked SKUs to Irish and British merchants for a range of products, including fixings, drill bits, blades, cutting and abrasive products, hand tools, sealants, and cleaning products. Their excellent service and competitive prices mean Olympic Fixings is widely trusted by electrical wholesalers, tool and plant hire businesses, builders, plumbers, and agricultural merchants. The company has a 20-strong, highly experienced field sales team serving its customers who can also access the company's online catalogue which displays their own personalised (and previously negotiated) prices.

Paul Gordon, Managing Director of Olympic Fixings, noticed that he was spending a great deal of time chasing data, only for it to be outdated by the time he had collated it. However, since implementing Vecta, Paul has been able to take snapshots of his sales performance at the touch of a button. And this innovation has freed up more time to manage and run his business.

Vecta is a cloud-based platform that stores a company's data and allows sales and management teams to access it over the Internet. What sets it apart is that it merges transactional data from the company's ERP system with customer and contact records. This provides a complete and instant overview of the company's performance, margins, and opportunities, which can be accessed from desktops, tablets, or smartphones.

'Our sales team were previously using manual systems to report and record their activity, so effectively we had no visibility from a CRM perspective. We had recently upgraded our ERP, which enabled us to integrate with a CRM system and so we looked closely at three providers,' Paul said.

In addition to the functionality Vecta gave us, we discovered it was also successfully integrated with another user of our ERP system and this proven link gave us extra confidence in its implementation.

Paul Gordon - Managing Director at Olympic Fixings

At Olympic Fixings, Vecta has been successfully implemented in all their Irish and UK sites with 40 users, including the management team and all field and internal sales staff now running the software. The implementation process was smooth, and all timelines were met, ensuring a seamless transition. Paul commended the Vecta team for providing excellent training, which helped the staff to adapt to the new system quickly.

Our team adopted the technology very quickly even those who were completely unfamiliar with using tablets. Our marketing manager took on the role of ‘Super User’ and championed the implementation of Vecta across the business.

Paul Gordon - Managing Director at Olympic Fixings

Additionally, Vecta has greatly improved Olympic's ability to capture customer information.

Before Vecta, the only thing we knew internally about our customers was where to send their invoice!

Now we have several thousand email addresses and we’ve been able to engage in direct marketing campaigns to key customer contacts where we send special offers and get orders in return!

Previously the only way we sold was through direct selling from the rep, so Vecta has facilitated a more multi channel approach.

Paul Gordon - Managing Director at Olympic Fixings

Results

• Vecta has enabled multi-channel selling with direct mail campaigns, resulting in orders by return
• Managers now investigate variants themselves rather than asking colleagues to create reports for analysis
• Vecta delivers link and upselling opportunities, as well as gap analysis and customer branch comparison data
• Variances can be investigated quickly using Vecta’s margin report

With the analytics capabilities of Vecta, Paul and his management team can confidently examine the business, identify any anomalies, and take a deeper dive into the details to uncover the root cause.

Paul explained that 'Before Vecta, we had to pull reports out of our ERP system and look at them in Excel – it was all very time-consuming. For example, recently, I looked at my margin rate for the month and saw that it had dipped.'

He was concerned over what might have happened but, 'within a few clicks I could see that - because we were clearing a particular line at effectively a negative margin and it was going very well - this was what was having an impact on the margin.'

'Vecta quickly confirmed that, rather than having a margin problem, it was just something we had planned to do,' he said.

Paul and his finance and sales directors also have their Vecta dashboards tuned to show them the performance of a sales rep or a product.

If anything is off track we can quickly investigate it ourselves now rather than having to ask other colleagues to produce reports from the ERP system.

From a selling perspective it’s really helpful. Vecta can also alert us to link and upselling opportunities that we will take full advantage of, as well as gap analysis and customer branch comparisons - which I know will be a real opportunity for us.

Paul Gordon - Managing Director at Olympic Fixings

Paul has also discovered that Vecta ensures the ‘intellectual property’ of a salesman remains within the company.

When a new sales person started last year, before we had started using Vecta, it was like he was working in virgin territory even though he was visiting established customers!

Paul Gordon - Managing Director at Olympic Fixings

'The old rep had taken all our knowledge of customer issues, buying patterns etc with him. Now, any new starter can be briefed and armed with all the customer information he needs via Vecta and can walk in with total confidence,' Paul explained.

Vecta dashboards can be customised according to the user’s role and the company’s preference. At Olympic, this means that the sales reps can only see sales records about their own customers with limited margin information.

Paul expressed that the most useful view for him and his finance director was the margin analysis.

He explained 'It’s such an easy tool as we can pin down any variances very quickly - to one transaction if needed. I’m frequently away from the office on business - particularly if I’m buying out in the Far East – and Vecta lets me see what’s happening in the business at any time without making loads of phone calls or sending emails.'

It’s enabled me to spend more time managing and directing my business rather than having to waste time chasing data.

Paul Gordon - Managing Director at Olympic Fixings