Innovation, quality, value and service are the cornerstones of Gwentaa’s business approach. Its development focus on bringing together information from multiple systems enables the company to create software that adds value to its customers’ bottom lines and improves their working day.
Gwentaa’s Supply Intelligence application exemplifies its commitment to those principles. It was developed to improve MPS profitability by better managing consumables costs, while simultaneously making the dealer’s supply team more efficient. “We are really proud of our Supply Intelligence application,” said co-founder Martin Tepe. “It is a product in continual development. We listen to our users and add features to accommodate the dealer’s changing environments.”
How the Supply Intelligence Application Came to Be
When a large dealer group started implementing FM Audit, it turned to Gwentaa to bring the systems together. The group needed to compare data from the device management software with what was in its ERP system. “We created dashboard apps to help bring an account onto FM Audit and monitor the ongoing health by comparing what was found in FM Audit with what was found in OMD or e-automate,” said Tepe. “We developed tools to help them compare information on both systems side by side. We don’t compete with e-automate, OMD or FM Audit. We supplement by filling in the gaps.”
Martin Tepe at BTA Boston
After it completed this project, several of the larger dealers in the group asked Gwentaa for a way to prevent the supply over-shipping problems they were facing. They knew the information they needed to make the shipment decision was in their various systems, but it wasn’t tied together in a usable manner. It took their supply team too long to look everything up. As a result, the team made its decision on partial information, and usually chose to ship rather than explain.
And that meant that sometimes supplies were shipped out that didn’t need to be.
Conversations led to prototypes, then revisions and enhancements, then more conversations and more revisions resulting in Supply Intelligence, Gwentaa’s web-based dashboard application for managing supply shipments.
Gwentaa’s first attempt at bringing it together was too slow, due to limitations in the OMD system. “The lookup took minutes, which seems infinite when you are talking with a customer. We found ways to provide an immediate response time with just a bit less information,” said Tepe.
When those dealers switched to e-automate, Gwentaa was able to bring together even more information rapidly. Supply Intelligence pulls together information from multiple screens in e-automate, combines that information with current details from your device management system (Print Audit, FM Audit or Print Tracker), analyzes the recent orders, and presents it all on a single screen in seconds.
Now, supplies team members can quickly and accurately decide what to do and can explain their choice to the customer while they are on the phone. “One of our customers did a pre- and post-implementation study,” said Tepe. “That customer’s average phone time dropped from five minutes per call to two minutes per call. Our tool allowed not only for a cost savings, but time savings.
The customer’s reps could then focus on additional tasks and projects. Our client’s customers appreciate the rapid response as well.”
And because a supplies team will spot over-shipments before they happen, there are fewer unnecessary supply orders. “It doesn’t do much good to know you over-shipped after the fact,” said Tepe.
“You need to not over-ship, and you need to be able to explain to the customer why. Customer satisfaction is always critical.”
“We have always held as a core value that we should provide reliable, quality applications at a reasonable price. We want you the dealer to feel comfortable with what we charge based on the value we provide to you,” said Tepe. “MPS contracts are the same way. Supply Intelligence is about enabling you and your customer to optimize supply usage.”
How Dealers Have Benefited from the Collaborative Development Process
Here’s what one customer had to say, “Gwentaa provided us with an exceptional product in the Supply Intelligence tool. In six short months of using the tool, we were able to drop our supply cost-of-goods over 10 percent.” This company was already working efficiently and was just looking for a way to do better, and has continued to see improvement in their costs. Its customer satisfaction scores rose as well.
Maurice Tepe at BTA Event
Why? When dealers use Supply Intelligence, they engage customers in a conversation. In turn, the customers realize that they and the dealer are working together for mutual benefit.
Supply Intelligence empowers your supply team, giving them the facts to share with the customer. For instance, they can explain to a customer that even though a device is reporting low toner, it won’t run out for 35 days based on current use.
Simple things help the dealer’s team respond and explain, such as showing tracking numbers for shipments that link directly to the shipper’s sites. The supply team can confirm to the customer when an item was or will be delivered.
More complex things—like displaying toner changes and matching those to shipments—let dealers see when the customer should have items on the shelf. Highlighting when a meter reading is necessary, or when a supply was changed too soon, lets the supply team get information from the customer while they have them on the phone, or lets them deal with premature toner changes.
“Any company that is shipping supplies under MPS contracts or supply-included agreements would save serious money using Supply Intelligence,” said Tepe. “That’s how all the tools included in our Reports Central Toolset work, bringing data together across the different dealer systems. Print Audit and FM Audit are great products, and so is e-automate,” added Tepe. “When we bring them together, the value of the combination is much more than the value of the individual applications.”
Our FM Audit tools make it simple to verify that everything is reporting properly before you send the bill. That makes it so much easier to validate meter readings before billing compared to adjusting or re-invoicing.
This same goal of helping dealer systems work together efficiently led to the development of POP Direct in 2016. POP Direct automatically transmits drop ship orders to the vendor’s system–no interaction required and no duplicated data entry on either side, thus improving the operational efficiency of the supply team.
Once the supply team creates the sales order for drop ship supplies, e-agent and POP Direct work together to get that order to the vendor with no further interaction. This allows the dealer to gain even greater automation benefits from the PO Processor program available from ECI e-Automate. “For example, we also worked with Pinnacle Sales of Ohio to bring the same level of automation to their orders without any dependence on a PO processor,” said Tepe.
“Even though we see a big opportunity with helping our customers control costs on the consumables side with Supply Intelligence and POP Direct, we continue to develop tools to connect systems together, improve operational efficiency, control costs and maximize the value from the information that dealers collect from all their systems,” said Tepe.
Given the company’s broad experience, Tepe expects Gwentaa to meet the challenges of the coming year. “The challenges are similar to what happened in the past, but with new wrinkles and twists. We’ve seen variations on many of these issues before, and we can craft solutions that anticipate changes before they happen,” he said. “Controlling supply costs, billing accurately, the customer experience and operational efficiency–these are all perennial issues but now with new details. Devices report automatically with more and more connectivity. Customers expect more timely information with emails and texts, desktop delivery and electronic invoicing.
Gwentaa has specialized in providing custom solutions to integration and connection issues for dealers. New vendors, new customers and new systems all need to communicate with each other. Gwentaa’s experience in handling these issues allows it to be more responsive to new variations—to the dealer’s benefit. “The more we connect the dealer’s systems together, and with the systems of their customers and their vendors, the more efficient and profitable the dealers will become,” said Tepe.
“In a commodity business, margins are razor thin,” said Tepe. “You don’t want to lose a penny of revenue or incur a penny of unneeded expense. When your overall margin is 10 percent and you ship a $100 toner that ended up on eBay, you need to sell $1,000 worth of product to break even. If you don’t control what you ship as an MPS provider, you will not thrive. Supply Intelligence helps you do that.”
Analytics are also essential to improving margins. How much toner do they already have? Where is it? Should you ship a higher yield cartridge or multiple units? What machines does Print Audit or FM Audit show that are not under contract? These are important questions, and the answers affect the dealer’s profitability.
Staffing expenses can really add up for any business, and one way to control those expenses is through automation. “Anything that can be automated without reducing customer satisfaction should be automated, and I don’t mean ‘press 1 for customer service,’” said Tepe.
Automation is at the core of the Supply Intelligence model: most of that information is already there, so why click through half-a-dozen screens? See it right now, all at once, and don’t waste time. “With POP Direct, once the sales order is created, everything from creating the purchase order to transmitting it to the vendor is automated. By that, I mean system-to-system direct ordering, not sending an email for someone to read,” said Tepe.
When Tepe looks to the future, he sees Gwentaa sticking to what it does best. “For us, the next big thing is the same thing: connecting the information from the dealer’s preferred applications to maximize the benefit the dealers get from those applications,” he said. “It’s what we do, we do it well, and as each new product comes out, there are new dots to connect.”
Contact info for Gwentaa
www.gwentaa.com,
Email: sales@gwentaa.com
Phone: (859) 240 6513
Join their Supply Intelligence group on LinkedIn.
