Case Studies

Craftmark (S) Pte Ltd

Established since 1981, Craftmark (S) Pte Ltd has been
marketing European brands and managing their distribution in
Singapore and the Far East. The company has progressed
over the past two decades and now specialises in men’s and
ladies’ leather bags and accessories.

The Challenge

Craftmark has a large team of sales promoterslocated at major departmental stores in Singapore.These promoters have to manage consignment stockat the departmental stores and attend to customers as well.

For many years, the promoters manually recorded all sales and inventory transactions onto forms. These forms are then returned to the main office, where they are manually processed to generate billings to the departmental stores. Besides being extremely tedious and prone to errors, the manual process is very timeconsuming as it can only be done in batches.

As business expands, the management of Craftmark started to source for a solution that would allow them to improve the work process to meet the increasing transaction volume. The few major criteria they set were:

1. Data must be sent back to the office in the fastest
   possible time
2. Computation of billings had to be automated
3. The software solution must be user-friendly

The Solutions

After searching around for a cost-effective and reliable solution to improve work processes, the management decided to upgrade their ACCPAC Plus (DOS) to SAGE ACCPAC ERP 200 and integrate it with the WorkEzy™ Mobile Solution, an ACCPAC AddOn developed by Stone Forest IT Pte Ltd.

Given the wide variety of solutions in the market, the deciding factor was the cost-effectiveness of ACCPAC with the WorkEzy™ Mobile Solution. It also encompassed the reliability of ACCPAC, which the company had used for many years. Together with Stone Forest IT, the new software solution was successfully deployed in more than 16 sites islandwide.

Cost-Effective

This solution entails the issuance of PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) to the sales promoters. Using PDAs instead of laptops meant that the project was deployed at a fraction of the usual cost. Firstly, a PDA is only about 30% of a laptop’s price. The cost of software (eg. for the Operating System, applications) and maintenance is also lower for a PDA compared to a laptop.

Automated and Integrated ACCPAC System

The solution enables promoters to collect sales transactions simply by scanning the barcode and entering the quantity into a PDA. Periodically, these transactions are wirelessly sent to the main office and uploaded directly into ACCPAC ERP for invoice processing (to the departmental stores). Stone Forest IT customised the process further to integrate billing agreements of various departmental stores with ACCPAC.

More Space for Display

The small-sized PDA frees up precious shelf space that can be used for product display instead.

More Time for Customer Service

With the implementation of this solution, promoters are able to spend more time servicing customers as the amount of time spent preparing reports is cut by 50%. The PDA’s ease of use also enables non-IT savvy promoters to learn how to operate it in a very short time.

Timely Business Information

In the office, billing to the departmental stores can now be processed in a more timely manner. The automation reduced the timeconsuming and tedious double-checking work required previously. Human errors were also reduced. With ACCPAC ERP, more timely reports are generated to assist management in making critical decisions.

Comprehensive Hands-On Training Programme

Together, Craftmark and Stone Forest IT prepared a comprehensive training programme that was carried out in
phases for the company’s administrators and promoters. Hands-on training was provided to ensure that they could
operate the devices. The training programme also enabled the administrators to train new promoters themselves.
This greatly speeded up the deployment of new staff to the job.