For over thirty years Sil-Mid Ltd has supplied a huge range of specialist materials used in all aspects of aerospace, aviation and high tech manufacturing that require full batch traceability and shelf life management.
As specialist distributors of adhesives, sealants, lubricants, silicones, paints, coatings and cleaning compounds they have the capability to source and supply over 14,000 products globally, in partnership with over 400 suppliers.
In order to manage their rapidly growing and increasingly sophisticated business Sil-Mid Ltd identified the need for a new ERP system. After exploring the market they felt that the WinMan ERP Software was the most appropriate as it not only supported all of their day to day activities but also offered a completely integrated website to replace their old and inefficient e-commerce solution which was only providing 4% of their turnover.
Andy Nickson, their Operations Director who selected and implemented the ERP system says: “Owing to our high volumes of low value orders in the £100-£200 bracket we felt we could make considerable savings and dramatic service improvements by offering our customers the ability to place their orders via our website. Of course this would also have the knock-on effect of reducing the time expended on the smaller orders, enabling our internal sales people to concentrate on the larger more complicated accounts.” Sil-Mid Ltd also wanted to ensure that their printed catalogue, now defunct, was replicated on their website for all to see. WinMan ERP holds all product data, price lists and images and now it’s just a matter of ticking a box to place an order through silmid.com. Also, the content management functionality makes it incredibly easy to upload banners, blogs, news stories, product and general updates.
The company went live with the WinMan e-Commerce solution in early 2010 with a target in year one of achieving 10% of turnover through web sales. Andy Nickson said: “We beat all expectations in the first year with 12% of turnover channelled though our new website and increased our customer base by 100%. We are now in our second year and are running at 15% and expect to achieve 20% of turnover by the end of year three”. He continues: “Another major benefit is that we have revived old accounts as a result of this facility and our competitors do not have the functionality”. All this while overall turnover has been increasing year on year.
A key benefit of the integration of WinMan e-commerce and WinMan ERP software has been the ability to draw stock availability and available-to-promise dates directly from the back office ERP system. This provides customers with accurate delivery dates even if the product is out of stock.
WinMan e-commerce also improved Sil-Mid Ltd’s search engine rankings. The friendly URLs, Google product feeds and automatic metadata population in WinMan e-commerce have made the task of search engine optimisation simple and freed their time to concentrate on developing sales.
Alongside the easy ordering that WinMan e-commerce offers customers it also provides them the ability to administer their own accounts. They can track orders, reprint invoices, see their current statement and repeat an old order; all securely from the website. This has also enabled the customer service team to spend more time focussing on delivering a smoother and more efficient world class service to their customers.
Always looking for ways to expand and to do things better, currently they are implementing export shipping which will give them the ability to ship worldwide taking into account hazardous and non-hazardous freight options; locations; shipping pricing and packaging which is expected to further increase e-commerce sales.
Sil-Mid Ltd is also using WinMan for three of their partner websites called Facet sites where they are effectively providing web-fulfilment services for their partners. Each WinMan website is individually linked to the WinMan back office ERP and every order taken is shipped from their customer’s consignment stock on site.
As for the future, Andy says: “We will shortly refurbish the look and feel of the website as we bring out version II and are planning to bring out a mobile app to make it easier and more convenient to order online”.