Case Studies

Whitehill Publishing

The decision to implement the PostCoder.com address lookup service for Sage 50 accounts has allowed Whitehill Publishing Ltd to remove 85% of its redundant historical records. This has allowed the print group to increase efficiency and avoid a serious system collapse.

Whitehill Publishing is a print group based in Hampshire, UK. Over the years, the company has built up a substantial client base in excess of 25,000 accounts. Postcoder.com for Sage 50 software was deployed in a bid to avoid severe capacity problems with Whitehill Publishing's finance system. Instead of struggling with a system congested by dormant accounts, Whitehill Publishing was able to remove 85% of expired details from its system, which has vastly improved the speed at which new account can be processed.

Congestion

Having built up an impressive client portfolio, all of whose details were retained on the database, Whitehill Publishing came to a point where their finance system had to be relieved in some way. All accounts were kept on file so that in situations whereby customers were reordering from the company, all their address details would be stored on the system already, removing the need to re-enter data manually. This process however, did not account for the substantial numbers of customers who only ordered from the company once, resulting in the system becoming overcrowded with huge numbers of dormant accounts, a severe detriment to the operational speed of the system.

Chris Richards, Director at Whitehill Publishing Ltd, comments "We would have suffered from severe productivity problems had we not been able to remove records. We were holding onto them solely to save time should an existing customer re-order from us."

PostCoder for Sage 50 software was deployed in April 2010 so that Whitehill Publishing had an accurate and rapid way of completing address details based solely on a postcode. This meant that records could be de-duplicated and deleted, freeing up the Sage system.

Richards continues, "With PostCoder.com's software, we can now be assured that storing customer details ourselves is no longer necessary as we can accurately complete address information automatically."

Support and productivity

Alongside the software implementation, Whitehill Publishing received additional support as required from the PostCoder.com team. Since the introduction of the PostCoder for Sage 50 software to the company, 85% of customers who have not ordered from Whitehill Publishing in the last two years have been removed from the system, creating real productivity benefits. The newly acquired accounts opened up each week can now be processed quicker and more effectively than before.

Richards concludes, "With PostCoder for Sage 50, it is very simple to locate and identify customers, making it easy and substantially faster to either create new accounts or re-set old accounts if needs be, both from the perspective of data entry completion and because the Sage system is now so much faster."