Office Team Case Study

Background

As one of the largest office supplies businesses in the UK, Office Team has grown rapidly through structured acquisitions and organic growth. Founded in 1888, the business now has over 12,000 customers providing them with a wide range of managed services and over 100k different products.

Today they provide their customers with a single trusted source for their business supplies requirements. Their expert teams operate under specialist brands, while as a Group they lead the market by providing the most extensive portfolio of business supplies and services – available via a single online portal.

The Challenge

To support their continued rapid growth, the management team needed a business process software platform that they could trust.

The businesses requirements were complex and diverse.

The platform had to be cloud based to accommodate multiple users in many locations, whilst providing centralized visibility and control over user permissions, quotations, spend limits, supplier selection and other key criteria.

To maintain the business’s rate of growth, the platform had to be intuitive and easy to use for new employees. As Office Team were in part growing through acquisition, they needed to be able to on-board new employees and get them productive quickly, so an easy to use solution with great support and training were critical.

It was essential that the platform provided rigorous process compliance and significant efficiencies for the significant number of smaller value projects, but equally be capable to managing more complex, higher value projects.

By the diverse nature of client requirements, they needed the ability to onboard, manage and carefully monitor a large numbers of customers and suppliers. Project performance had to be tracked 24×7 to ensure a high quality of service to clients.

Management needed to be able to keep a close eye on project profitability, so a powerful reporting solution was essential. Additionally, the transactional data had to be combined with performance information from other data sources to provide a 360 degree view of business KPIs and service level performance.

And as a business highly reliant on efficiency of its operations, the platform had to tightly integrate with their existing ERP system for stock management and logistics.

The Solution

After a thorough review of the market, Office Team selected Claritum Enterprise.

For simple client requirements, users can quickly competitively bid to a pre-approved panel of suppliers, evaluate bid responses and respond with quotes for customers quickly and efficiently.

For more standard products and services, Claritum Enterprise manages the negotiated volume-based deals with selected suppliers, enabling improved pricing for customers and increased volumes for suppliers. Where Office Team manage larger scale and more complex projects, through the Claritum Enterprise platform, the team can accurately specify requirements, find suitably qualified suppliers and provide customers with a highly managed service.

Master Data Records, held on the company’s ERP, are accessed and updated daily within Claritum via a web services integration, ensuring a single ‘point of truth’ for customer and supplier records.

The client services, account management, specialist buyers, supplier managers and management have highly defined permissions, and approval limits, to align roles and workflow to the needs of the business.

Claritum’s comprehensive web services API enabled deep integration with the client’s ERP. Ensuring that management could access comprehensive reporting data from both platforms , with their Claritum enterprise solution reporting system. Enabling them, for the first time, to have accurate and up to date project visibility across the organisation.