If you work in a large business you probably know how important it is to keep your corporate customers happy. And how difficult it can be sometimes to do something that really matters.
At least one personal protective equipment (PPE) manufacturer has hit the right note, though, with an idea that makes life easier for its top clients… and at the same time saves them up to £50,000 a year.
That is roughly the value of the administration time invested every year by DMM’s biggest customers when they had to keep track of all their PPE by hand.
As a maker of premium products, DMM knew that wasn’t good enough, particularly when some of its larger customers were placing orders for more than 10,000 items a year. That’s why DMM decided to add RFID tag scanning to its products in 2014.
The DMM iD tagging scheme made it a lot easier for customers to log product data, for example for inspection purposes.
But Robert Partridge, DMM’s product manager, knew the icing on the cake would be to also provide a software system that could store all that information. This was not a task for DMM, though.
Partridge had seen other hardware manufacturers try and fail when it came to developing software to go with their products. It just wasn’t a core skill, which meant the results would be costly and possibly sub-standard. Fortunately, Partridge knew where to look for help.
At the time, DMM was sharing a business park with Papertrail. The two companies started talking, and Papertrail’s technical experts set about integrating the Papertrail platform with DMM’s back-office systems.
The upshot is that now a customer who scans a DMM product serial number can quickly and easily import the product details to their Papertrail account, at no additional cost.
Partridge estimates this could ultimately save up to 90% of the administration time involved in an inspection, and some of DMM’s customers have already halved the time they need for inspections every year.
Besides saving time and money on inspections, the customers are using their PPE for longer. Before, many would simply throw the equipment away when it was due for inspection, because it was cheaper to buy new items than to spend time on checks.
Now they are saving on new purchase costs without having an impact on health and safety standards… which is plenty of reason for customers to feel happy about choosing DMM.
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