Lightstore is a Dublin-based lighting company that supplies and distributes lighting products to architects, designers and others in the construction trade for major developments. Established in 1990, it provides much more than just a basic service and provides consultancy to its clients on the technical issues surrounding lighting.
Choosing the right lighting for a particular setting is dependent on elements such as the amount of lumens provided by a particular unit, the amount of natural light in a space, the height of the ceilings and many other factors. It does a lot of computer-aided design (CAD) work on behalf of customers and when providing a quote gives options in terms of price, look and feel, and energy consumption of products. “At the back-end of last year we started to think about how we could do more to get a greater share of the work that was out there and how we could use mature technology to get an advantage over others in the market,” says Derek Grogan, IT and operations manager with Lightstore. “We had solid processes in place but we wanted to make them smoother and more efficient. We also wanted the ability to deal with more projects.”
Beating the bottleneck
In order to provide a quote to customers, staff had to pull information from a number of sources including the accountancy system, supplier catalogues and websites. This was causing bottlenecks and was placing a limit on how much sales could be increased with the current number of sales people.
In addition, Lightstore wanted to be able to showcase its products on a website. “We didn’t fancy the idea of redesigning the pages as the products changed,” explains Grogan. “We needed a tool for updating the database and automatically presenting the latest cut of our catalogue to customers.”
Grogan likens the role of Lightstore to that of a broker filtering out the huge volume of products that it can source from its European suppliers and presenting what it most relevant for the local market.
“We have a set of preferred suppliers mostly based in Italy, Germany and the UK,” explains Grogan. “We are reducing a massive volume of information to a level that people can understand and our customers trust us to have done the due diligence on our suppliers and the products.”
New Perspective
Lightstore implemented a product called Perspective from local developers Shared Perspective to manage product information internally and also how this information can be efficiently distributed to customers in the form of detailed quotes. The company has now built a single catalogue that is used internally and also powers Lightsource’s website.
The Perspective product is flexible enough to allow the information to be categorised in a number of different ways, but in Lightstore’s case it has categorised the products by project, supplier and product type.
“All our staff are highly expert in the product set,” explains Grogan. “Looking to the future and expansion, we can’t clone those guys, but this system is like giving another half a brain.”
To date the real impact of the tool has been internally as staff can respond to queries much more efficiently. However, the same catalogue can also be viewed on Lightstore’s website (www.lightstore.ie) and according to Grogan even without any promotion a small part of the client base if already using the site as a reference tool.
One of the challenges of building a website for lighting products is ensuring they look visually appealing on the site. “We’ve put a lot of effort into improving the pictures,” says Grogan. “We have to get a lot on each page but we also have to have the picture quality so that people can see the detail they need.”
Although the catalogue was only put on the Web at the beginning of the year, the site already features over 1,000 different product items in 700 different categories.
Modular build
Shared Perspective has developed the Perspective product in a series of modules that customers can harness to manage their business more effectively. These modules include online sales, requisitioning, warehouse management, mobile access, telesales, product catalogue management, content management and a portal.
Ronan Daly, managing director of Shared Perspective describes the suite as a “set of business intelligence tools to help organisations see and improve how their business performs”. The company’s background is in web-enabling and integrating legacy applications for customers so it’s no surprise that Perspective provides in-built connectivity for other systems so that it can take inputs as to what is happening in the business.
“We are targeting middle-tier businesses – those who think they can’t afford this kind of sophisticated technology,” says Daly. “We have broken it up into modules so that mid-size companies can afford it.” Typical projects take 2 to 8 weeks to implement as opposed to the many months that is typical for business intelligence projects in large enterprises.
The next step for Lightstore is to link the product catalogue to a sophisticated quotation system. Before the introduction of the Perspective product catalogue, staff would pull the information for a quote from a variety of sources and then input the quote into the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system it was using from Exchequer. The quote is then moved through the system as it changes from a quote to an order to a delivery note and ultimately an invoice. The product catalogue was already allowing staff to product quotes more quickly but the quotes received by the customer were still produced manually.
The quotation system will now be automated – pulling product details and imagery from the catalogue and fully integrating with Lightstore’s ERP system using another module of the Perspective software. Once a staff member chooses the products from the catalogue, the relevant information will be pulled into an Adobe PDF document and also copied to the Exchequer financials. In a relatively short space of time, Lightstore has done what many large organisations are still struggling to do and mid-tier companies feel they cannot afford – become an adaptive enterprise that can quickly respond to its customers needs and gain competitive advantage over its competitors.
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