Tags Know-how, Strategy, Entrepreneur, Change, Collaboration, Growth

Paint by numbers

If company growth and market evolution make e-commerce an obvious solution, then collaboration will need to go well beyond IT providers. And everyone will be able to play a part, as Paul Gander discovers.

When Firwood Paints, based in Bolton, won a DTI-backed e-Commerce Award in September 2005, it was as the region’s best end-to-end integrated business. The company’s new website (www.firwood.co.uk) forged a dynamic link not only between a customer-facing platform and back-office functions, but also between the company and a swathe of fresh prospects.

But then the entire history of companies like Firwood has been about developing and expanding links with an ever-shifting customer base. With a total workforce of 47, Firwood has six sales people on the road, and deals with many more customers through telesales. The company needed to attract new users of its commercial and industrial coatings.

As ambitious small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) have seen their horizons expand from being regional to national and, more recently, increasingly global, e-commerce solutions have stepped in to bridge that gap.

MD Martin Wallen says that, a year after the launch of its e-commerce site, the company doesn’t yet have figures for the contribution made by online sales, “but the impact has been a significant increase in enquiries,” he says. The value of the website is even more difficult to quantify, he explains, since it provides so many leads for the sales force to chase.

The company was set up by Wallen’s grandfather in 1925 as a manufacturer of both decorative and industrial products. It now produces only specialist paints in the B2B sector. In the very early days, says Wallen, business was conducted face-to-face in locations such as Manchester’s Exchange.

Over the years, the importance of the sales force and of alliances with different distributors increased.

In his 28 years with the company, Wallen has seen the size of the sales team vary, and distributors come and go. Distributors pose a particular problem for SMBs in specialist areas such as Firwood’s: “They are likely to want to stock only a core range of products,” he points out. “But then there are people who need other specialist paints and coatings in our range.”

While a bigger player might be able to tie a distributor into its products, to the exclusion of competitors, a smaller supplier is unlikely to have that clout. Overall, loyalty posed an additional challenge in using the distributor channel. Meanwhile, the decline of manufacturing in the UK signalled a more general erosion of the company’s domestic market.

With three UK sites in Bolton, Sheffield and West Bromwich, Firwood’s global reach may seem limited. Now, says Wallen, the website generates enquiries from around the world. Recent examples have come from Latvia, for high-temperature paint, and from China for products suitable for a food wholesaler. Closer to home, the company says it has been able to penetrate government departments where its sales team would never have been able to set foot.

Collaborative effort

Firwood has not always seen its website as a direct sales route. Six years ago, it designed and set up a simple site using Microsoft Front Page. This was carried out internally, but Wallen admits that his team is not skilled in IT. So when the opportunity arose to tap into precisely that type of skilled expertise which it lacked, Firwood leapt at the chance.

This came in the form of the DTI-supported e4C project, which aims to optimise the use of IT in the chemicals industry. Specialist consultancy Strategem carried out an assessment of Firwood’s needs. Initially, the manufacturer envisaged creating an enhanced version of its existing website – “but then we got a bit more ambitious,” says Wallen.

Consultation with existing customers was invaluable, according to Firwood, at both the design stage, before the e-commerce site was set up, and at the later trial stage.

E-commerce specialist CSI, which provided Firwood with its new WebSphere Commerce Express solution, says it normally recommends that customers conduct a peer-group research forum.

“People used to design an IT system and then wonder why no-one used it,” says business development director Chris Booker. “But today, this type of forum has become accepted practice.”

According to Wallen, many of the 30 customers Firwood spoke to highlighted the value of being able to download information. Booker at CSI explains: “Firwood’s site enables customers to service their own needs better. It may be information requirements, but they’re of real value to the customer. It’s a stage in the process that has to be satisfied before a transaction can take place.”

Customer feedback also suggested that the new site should classify products not only by type but also by end use, says Wallen. And once it was up, feedback helped to improve flow-through on the website.

The award-winning end-to-end integration on Firwood’s e-commerce platform can be seen as one example of IBM’s much-prized service-orientated architecture (SOA).

“A customer places an online order, which comes in via WebSphere,” says Wallen. “The back-office BPCS Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system pulls any online orders from the site every few minutes or so. These are processed, going straight to despatch, invoices generated and online payments matched up with the ledger. What’s more, since the inputting is done by the customer, this can reduce errors.”

Firwood has reaped some of the other well-documented benefits of e-commerce. It can have a major impact in reducing costs, of course. The new customers your website attracts are more likely to stay close to quoted list prices. And search engine optimisation can make a dramatic difference to the number of hits logged per day.

The future

“I have a degree of confidence that WebSphere will continue to develop,” says Wallen. “With some of the other system suppliers, we felt we wouldn’t get a long-term payback. The systems were bespoke, and we would have been very much at the mercy of that particular supplier.”

Some site development options are already available to Firwood: “Multi-currency and multi-language functionality is built in,” he says. “And when you deal with more than one specialist area, at a given point you have to ask yourself whether you should open different ‘shops’ in those areas.”

Never one to paint itself into a corner, this would be an option that Firwood could develop in future, as a business that has already transformed itself completely and continues to evolve.

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