Idion.BSG, the Business Solutions division of JSE-listed Idion Technologies, has succesfully completed a Visual Elk Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Pilot implementation for 3M South Africa`s Abrasives and Dental divisions, which has resulted in a project which will see 3M roll-out the solution to the entire company and branches involving 230 `3Mers` in total.
"Sales representatives at 3M South Africa who participated as pilot users in the project, found the Visual Elk software made their daily tasks a lot easier, with a wealth of information now available `at their fingertips`," says Marion Bell, Visual Elk Implementation Project Manager at 3M SA.
"This system impacts all our operations, from sales and marketing through to customer service and credit control, resulting in increasing efficiency, improving communications between the various business functionalities, and improving profitability."
Visual Elk has "a tailored syncrhonization process, which allows remote users to exchange up-to-date customer information while in the field, and maintains the currency of all Visual Elk corporate databases in an enterprise," points out James Jewell, CRM Solutions Specialist at Idion.BSG.
Bell points out that, "Visual Elk is a highly flexible application, designed to allow organisations to implement integrated and complete CRM or customer-centric business solutions. It has been specifically designed to support individual sales and marketing requirements, such as those within 3M SA, and is able to tightly integrate with back end operational systems."
"Fully responsive information systems that cater to today`s ever-changing business needs provide a vital springboard over the competition," Jewell adds.
"Competition forces businesses to differentiate and it is in the area of sales and marketing that the differences are most obvious. Change is constant and Visual Elk represents a major enhancement to the relationship between the enterprise and its customers," he concludes.
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Idion Technology Holdings
Idion Technology Holdings is an IT company listed on the JSE`s Main Board. The company consists of two subsidiaries, IDION Software (formerly known as Silverlake Technology Solutions) and IDION.BSG (Business Solutions Group).
Idion Software develops leading edge software products for the IBM AS/400 market on a worldwide basis, while Idion.BSG specialises in the development and implementation of applications for specific business needs. The company has one of the highest concentrations of Microsoft skills in Africa, and is an implementation partner for a variety of software solutions, including products from Keyfile Corporation (Keyflow Commerce), Ixchange (Ability), Great Elk (Visual Elk).
At present, 3M SA are running Visual Elk on a MS NT Server, with MS SQL Server 7.0 as the backend database, with Lotus Notes as the transfer agent for all the remote users.