entrustIT - Always On | Always Current | Always There

Key Industrial Equipment was established in 1973. Now part of the Manutan Group, Key’s objective remains as it has for over 30 years. Beginning with speed of response for a quotation, through telephone response time from their contact centre, to delivery of goods to the customer’s doorstep, Key is committed to 100% customer satisfaction.

The Manutan Group’s business is based on a unique concept, which is to bring together in a single catalogue a wide range of high quality items at the most attractive prices to meet the requirements of businesses and local authorities. Currently, the group consists of some 23 companies located within 20 European countries. In all, the Group offers over 200,000 products on the European market. The Group’s offering covers all aspects of corporate life, including materials handling, lifting, storage, furniture and office and workshop supplies. It also covers all equipment, tools and products for production, maintenance, safety, quality–control and shipping departments and it supplemented by an array of services such as guarantees, assembly, returns and exchanges, customization and e–procurement.

For major clients, Key Industrial operates a Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) solution. Under this arrangement, Key delivers and manages stores at the customer site but inventory in these stores remains the property of Key until drawn out by customer staff. The customer benefits from accessible on-site stores with stock levels managed by a third party at no cost, whilst Key retains a committed and long-term client. Obviously, this arrangement depends upon consistent and regular reports so that both parties remain aware of the trading position.

Historically, VMI reports were produced from a spreadsheet system developed in-house with data held in Microsoft Access 2000. Key Industrial recognised this approach was reaching end of life. Paul McFarlane, Key’s IT Manager says, “VMI is really important us in delivering our service objectives to our major clients and the existing reporting technology was creaking at the seams. We needed to update our daily reports but also to deliver more, better and more up to date information to both the client and to our relationship managers. It was obvious that the existing technology just wasn’t going to be able to cope”.

McFarlane consulted entrustIT, hoping to identify a future proof solution that would provide the information needs of both the customer and the account team, that could be delivered to the client via a modern user-friendly interface and yet one which would require no additional infrastructure investment from Key. Finally of course, it was vital that the existing flow of spreadsheets was never interrupted. entrustIT’s solution was to re-develop the database application in SQL Server 2005, replacing the spreadsheet system with a range of reports in Microsoft Reporting Services. Then they migrated Key to their BIaaS product which provides hosted data warehousing  in combination with Panorama Software’s NovaView OLAP client software. This combination puts powerful and intuitive, graphical information analysis functions capability in the hands of end users and has also enabled Key to open up their VMI systems to customer access - a first for this industry sector.