Case Study

Office Team

The Challenge
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 covering office supplies, print, workwear, and fully outsourced management of tail spend. To support their continued rapid growth, the management team needed a business process software platform that they could trust. 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. 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 many 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. 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 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 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 reporting system. Enabling them, for the first time, to have accurate and up to date project visibility across the organisation.

Results

 

Rapid Growth

Today, the Office Team continues to grow rapidly and remains the largest office supplies business in the UK.

Improved Customer Retention

The combined organization has significant category expertise, buying power, a national logistics network and high levels of customer satisfaction and retention.  

Increase in Winning New Clients

The sourcing and procurement service offered to clients has been consistently growing, by winning new clients, delivering high service levels, and retaining a high calibre client base in an increasingly wide range of sectors.

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Happy Client