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CASE TRAMS | ECONOCOM

Streamlining Order Processing and Invoice Management: A Case Study on Trams|Econocom

Ian McNair

PURCHASING MANAGER

  • Case TRAMS | ECONOCOM

    Streamlining Order Processing and Invoice Management: A Case Study on Trams|Econocom

Ian McNair

PURCHASING MANAGER

BACKGROUND

About Trams | Econocom

Trams is a leading IT supplier in the UK with over 30 years’ experience in the sector, serving a variety of businesses, from primary educational institutions to large-scale corporations like Warner Brothers and BBC. Initially starting out as an Apple reseller, they have since expanded their product offering to include a variety of brands and solutions. Trams is now known for its value-added services, spanning from cloud storage solutions to Tech-as-a-Service and workflow automation. In recent years, the company also joined Econocom Group to support its combined growth plans in the IT sector in the UK and Europe. About five years ago, Trams started using our software. To learn more about how and why that partnership began, we interviewed Ian McNair, purchasing manager at Trams.

CHALLENGES

The explosive growth of Trams | Econocom

Over the years, Trams has experienced significant growth, with sales exceeding the previous year by 10-20% each time. And while growth is naturally positive, it also led to an increase in the number of orders and invoices the company had to manage, with consequent challenges. Due to that growing number of orders and invoices, the purchasing and sales departments were mainly working on repetitive, operational tasks. Instead of working on strategic tasks, they were spending more and more time on ordering products, getting confirmation from suppliers, processing invoices and so on.

The day someone says: we’re going to take away Onetrail and you have to go back to the ‘old-fashioned’ way, might very well be the day I retire.

IAN MCNAIR, PURCHASING MANAGER

SOLUTION

Automated order processing and invoice management

To address these challenges, Trams turned to Onetrail. Because they work with Netsuite, we suggested Nolan’s eInteract. This tool integrates and displaysour data directly within Netsuite, offering real-time insights on supplier inventory, orders, invoices, and more. The standard nature of this solution, coupled with the pre-existing connections between Trams’ suppliers and our Trading Partner Network, made the implementation fairly straightforward. Using our services, Trams was able to automate their order processing and invoice management, resulting in significant time and cost savings. This allowed the company to focus on other aspects of their business. We asked Ian how our solution exactly helped Trams in their day-to-day operations:

Solutions

INTERVIEW IAN MCNAIR – PURCHASING MANAGER

How do you handle purchase orders now as compared to before you were using Onetrail?

Without Onetrail, we’d have to create the purchase order and either email it and get confirmation back, or even the very old-fashioned way of phoning it through. Best case scenario, the supplier had a decent web portal which we could use to place the order.

But now, the whole process is automated, and we typically get confirmation within minutes. This saves us a lot of time and gives us the opportunity to focus on more important tasks.

Has working with Onetrail improved your customers’ experience?

Definitely, to give you an example: When a customer’s order is received at 5:15, we can have the purchase order sent to the supplier at 5:16 and get confirmation back at 5:17. This allows us to ship it the same night and deliver it the next day.

Does Onetrail save Trams money? And if so, how?

It depends on how you calculate the costs. Prices at suppliers are all quite similar, so in that regard it doesn’t save us much. But the real win is we don’t have to phone 5 different suppliers for small potential price differences anymore. That saves us a lot of hidden operational costs, way more than those minor price differences would save.

Ian McNair

PURCHASING MANAGER