Forging Better Business Operations Through Technology

Sadie's was managing their business with a couple of piles of manila order folders and a series of Excel spreadsheets. This meant painstaking double and triple entry of data in multiple places and occasional misplaced orders, resulting in lost business

Working with Anvil Automation, a database structure was constructed that streamlined their operation, centralizing all of their client and order information in one place. Orders are no longer handwritten, but rather keyed directly into their system as they are taken over the phone. As orders are entered, inventory needs and production schedules are instantly updated.

Customer service phone calls had been a nightmare in the past; occasionally requiring the customer service operator to go to the production rooms to physically check on orders. With their new system, as an order moves through the production cycle, its status is updated in the system, giving Aunt Sadie's operators real-time order status for customer service calls.

Similarly, the inventory manager no longer needs to go through a weekly painful inventory process to generate his materials orders. He simply runs a report and his needs are right in front of him.

Aunt Sadie's system revolutionized their shipping process. In the past, after each order was packed, a shipping clerk had to get a shipping amount from UPS, hand-write an invoice and packing slip, key the customer's credit card information onto a terminal for processing, and finally key the customer's shipping information into a computer running UPS World Ship.

This process was not only time consuming, requiring about 12-15 minutes per order, but it was also prone to costly error. The Anvil-built system interfaces directly with Sadie's credit card processor as well as UPS. Now, once an order is packed the shipping clerk clicks a single button on his display screen. The system calculates the order weight, obtains shipping costs directly from UPS, processes the credit card charge, generates an invoice and packing slip and prints UPS shipping labels. With the introduction of this system, the average shipping time per order fell from a quarter of an hour to a couple of seconds.

Aunt Sadie's estimates that the elimination of error combined with the labor savings saved Aunt Sadie's roughly $65,000 in the first year of operation, paying for the system within the six months of deployment.

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Anvil Automation built a solution called Sprocket for Ptown Bikes. Sprocket automated the entire reservation and rental process. Tied directly into their website, Reservations are now taken electronically. Customers go to the Ptown Bikes website (www.ptownbikes.com) creating their own reservation; no need to phone in. The website checks bicycle availability based on the customer's height (to get an appropriately sized bike), date range and model selection (ie. mountain bike, road bike etc.), finding a match it creates the booking, processes a rental deposit, and issues an electronic confirmation to the customer.

For Ptown Bikes, this has meant the elimination of the need for phone reservations, and since the customers are creating their own bookings online there is no need for a data entry person to key customer information into the system; the customer has already done that. There is also no longer a need to create complex rental schedule sheets. Sprocket knows when there are bikes available and when there aren't. In fact, a reservation doesn't need to be looked at again until the customer arrives to pick up the bike. At this point Sprocket automatically generates the rental contract for signature and the customer is on his way.

Ptown Bikes rental rates are based on the amount of time that a bike is rented. Now when a customer returns with a rental bike, a single click and Sprocket calculates the correct billing amount, processes the customer's credit card and issues a receipt.

In the past, the amount due for the rental was calculated by the clerk on duty. Sprocket has not only reduced the amount of time needed to do this but more importantly has eliminated costly billing errors. Ptown Bikes reports that not only has Sprocket brought them reduced labor costs through increased efficiency, a more professional appearance to its customers, but most significantly, the increase in revenue through the elimination of its billing problems paid for the system in the first four months of operation.

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Oscient's marketing department was tasked with finding a method of efficiently tracking these physicians, their lectures and information about the physicians in attendance. Having these data centralized and tracked in a meaningful way allows Oscient to track Peer-To-Peer expenses, payments and most importantly, return on investment. By looking at attendees' prescribing patterns before a lecture and tracking changes after a lecture, Oscient is able to gauge the effectiveness of these lectures.

Oscient also needed a way to extrapolate specific data required by certain states relating to marketing expenses, gifts and consulting fees. Custom reports were built for monitoring the data on a real-time basis to accommodate state reporting.

Leveraging its ability to provide an easy to use centralized database platform, Anvil created a single system that would track all of these data. Working closely with the Peer-To-Peer staff and the associate director of marketing operations at Oscient, Anvil built an efficient system for coping with this data management challenge.

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