A long-established name in the Promotional Merchandise industry, Arcadia has made a name for itself in handling large corporate contracts, fulfilling orders globally with offices and warehouses world wide, servicing high profile clients.
Arcadia creates a branded website for each client, using the Magento e-commerce system. For the UK office alone, these sites create thousands of orders each month which need to be checked, invoiced and shipped. Arcadia’s ERP software, AIM Smarter (or Promoserve, to those who’ve been in the industry a little longer!) is also an old name in the industry, with a legacy dating back to the late 1990s. Although it’s been modernised and now includes a web based version, many users are on a version that has no simple integration option for modern websites. For Arcadia, this meant manually keying in hundreds of orders per week – a full time job.
GetConnect also has a long history with this industry – technical director John O’Rourke has worked with dozens of promotional merchandise companies in the past twenty years, integrating websites and warehouses with widely used systems such as Promoserve and Promotional Office. That expertise has been captured in our GetConnect Hub product – a system that enables connections with a modern e-commerce system like Magento, and legacy systems such as old versions of Promoserve, covering everything from lead capture to purchase orders to stock updates.
It’s important to talk about trust here – these automations are going to handle a large amount of your revenue, so everyone involved needs time to build up trust in the system. Many companies have made the error of blindly trusting an off-the-shelf integration, without taking the time to ensure it’s doing the right job, and suffered from delivery errors and missed expectations.
To “connect” a system sounds simple, but it’s more than just flicking a switch. Every business, and in this industry, every client, has it’s own set of rules and processes – for example, a large estate management client has branded goods distributed to local agents, meaning that the company name on the delivery address could be different to the billing address, and very important to successful shipping. We worked closely with the team to test several clients and ensure the task of “data mapping” was working even in special cases.
An example of how important it is for us to understand the client’s business, and the software we’re connecting to, showed in the way we chose to map the shipping addresses – we were able to allow per-client settings to map the company name and delivery contact differently, ensuring that Arcadia can meet each client’s individual needs.
Understanding the software also helped with correctly updating orders – ensuring that tracking numbers were added correctly to Magento, so that the end user gets a shipping notification at the right time.
In the next step, when the system is ready to be used, a process for migrating data from the old to the new system must be created, and tested – in this case, the website was new and so there was no old data to be migrated. Your data is one of the most valuable assets your business owns, so it’s important to know where it all is, and how it is secured.
After taking time to work with us and build up trust in the GetConnect Hub, Arcadia now uses it to process nearly all UK website orders. This has freed up staff from one full time equivalent job, and those staff are now able to focus on further improving customer service, after sales support, and dealing with any shipping issues.
The impact of that change is not just seen in that reduced manual labour – it’s also felt in needing less frequent management reports, allowing the leadership team to focus more on strategy and new accounts.
“With the same size team, “ says Simon Dalton, Operations Director, “we now have double the capacity.”
