Member Article

Marches Ironmongery overhauls tech systems to maintain fast growth

Architectural hardware supplier and ironmongery manufacturer, Marches, has overhauled its business processes to increase productivity as part of its efforts to improve company-wide efficiencies for continued growth.

The company, which is based in Ddole Road Industrial Estate, Llandrindod Wells, has thousands of customers all over the UK, from local tradesmen, builders, joiners and carpenters to property developers, architectural ironmongers, timber merchants and end users themselves buying products from Marches online and in-store.

Over the past two years, Marches had experienced a significant jump in orders, which saw the company sourcing new team members to accommodate the increasing volume and manually inputting an expanding volume of orders. Maintaining such fast growth was something the company knew would be a challenge to sustain via its previous software, which it had clearly outgrown, as Rob Nicholls, Product and Supply Chain Manager, explains:

“Managers and supervisors were having to undertake a lot of manual processes, which ultimately does affect the growth of the business. We had an increase by 10% to 20% in terms of headcount, so it was the right time for us to move away from those manual processes. We needed to make sure that we were upgrading our software based on the increased turnover which we were facing.”

Business and stock management software Profit4 was implemented, as Marches needed an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that has been designed to help companies digitally transform their operations by supporting multi-channel selling.

Rob Nicholls concluded: “We’re a company that likes to try and keep everything in-house, we do pretty much everything within the company except for software. That’s something that we don’t specialise in. We looked at Microsoft Dynamics and that would have been a huge jump for us. OGL Software was a good fit for us in terms of reducing the manual processes, but also having some familiarity with the look and feel of the software.”

The new software is built around roles and user requirements, with an intuitive user interface to manage all core business processes, making it quick and easy to use.

By bringing Marches’ business processes, including contact management, multi-channel sales order management, eCommerce, stock control and management, finance and accounting, and reporting and analytics data together into one platform, the new technology saves the entire team valuable time.

Marches has already seen an increase in productivity since overhauling its tech systems. Previously the team spent longer on admin tasks like creating product codes, as they were unable to import data in bulk. Now all sales channels are coordinated and updated regularly with minimal need for the team to do admin input themselves.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by OGL Software .