It is not just corporates who are streamlining and automating their supply chains. Increasingly, software vendors are targeting the SME market, and solutions that would previously have been out of the reach of the smaller companies are now affordable.

Ace Fixings is a case in point. An Irish-based supplier of tools, fixtures and fittings to the construction industry, it has a staff of 250. Its 24-strong sales force operates in Ireland and the UK, and most of its business comes from visits by sales staff to construction sites. Three years ago it implemented a Microsoft-based solution aimed at eliminating the errors and delays inherent in its ordering process.

That process, as Eddie McStravick, the group IT systems manager, freely admits, was an “absolute shambles”. A sales representative would visit a construction site and take an order from the builders. He would check the prices in a printed catalogue, phone the warehouse to make sure the goods were in stock, calculate the cost, and finally handwrite the order on a piece of paper. The next day the rep would fax all his orders through to the office, where administrative staff would key them into the sales ordering system. It was, says Mr McStravick, “horrendously slow”.

It was also error-prone. Sometimes the sales representative would enter the wrong product codes or include inaccurate discount rates. “You couldn’t pinpoint the volume of orders we were getting incorrect but certainly there were orders that were wrongly delivered, and it was costing us time and money,” says Mr McStravick.

The firm decided it needed a more efficient approach. “We were looking for a solution that would enable our sales reps to go on to the road, take orders remotely and then synchronise them to our backend system at our HQ in Ballymena,” says Mr McStravick.

Ace Fixings approached Anglia Business Solutions, who implemented a mobile solution based on Microsoft’s Navision (now renamed as Microsoft Dynamics NAV), which Ace was already using to manage its finances. The challenge that Anglia faced was to ensure that the product information the salesforce could see from their mobile devices was up-to-date. Synchronising large amounts of data across limited bandwidth is extremely difficult, and Ace Fixings had 20,000 items in its product catalogue.

Anglia tackled the problem by using its own Drizzle technology, which was able to deliver a snapshot of the data to each sales representative. “It just updates the relevant data that you need, and the changes that have been made to the database, so when you’re synchronising back, you’re only synchronising changes as opposed to trying to take your 20,000 items and hoist them across the network,” says Mr McStravick.

The resulting application runs on a handheld device: “It allows our sales reps to go out on the road, take the order on the building site, complete the order and then synchronise the order across the GPRS network.” he explains. “That is then synchronised back to our SQL server, and then the order is sitting waiting for our warehouse management team to process.”

After a six month pilot, and some on-the-job training, the application was rolled out to the entire salesforce. The difference it has made to the process of taking an order from a customer is “dramatic,” says Mr McStravick: “We’re able to go onsite and say ‘This is in stock’. We’re providing the customer with instantaneous information. We’re giving a quotation to the customer at the site as well – it’s no longer a matter of trying to work it out with a calculator and a pen.” At the same time, the reps have instant access to information about special offers and discounts that they can offer the customer.

It has also speeded up the process of order entry, he says: “We’re now instantaneously getting orders through as they are placed. It’s removed the errors that were made – we are now able to provide our customer base with accurate information.”

The mobile application now accounts for 75 per cent of all orders made, with the rest tending to come directly from smaller customers or through the e-commerce site. Additional efficiency gains have been made through reassigning some administrative staff to other work because they no longer have to key in orders.

The sales reps already have e-mail and internet access on their mobile devices, and Ace Fixings is now looking at the possibility using 3G networks to improve the performance of the application even further. But the new process has already given them a competitive advantage, says Mr McStravick, because it is so much faster and more accurate than the old paper-based process: “With the handheld devices, they simply key in the order. They can look up the prices, they can look up the stock, and the whole order process is validated before it’s synchronised to our backend system.”