Mentor FLT Training Ltd
Established in 1988, Mentor FLT Training Ltd is the UK's
leading provider of training and associated services for materials
handling equipment and workplace transport. The company has
developed into a hugely successful, expanding organisation
employing 130 training instructors and 25 office-based staff
nationwide.
Business Issues
Before the system overhaul, a major problem for Mentor was the
inefficiencies resulting from double entry of data and
time-consuming manual processes. They were running three separate
systems; Telemagic, SageLine 50 and their own in-house training
certification database. Neil Rose, Systems Manager at Mentor
comments, "Integration was obviously a key factor. We needed to
build a bridge between our accounts and CRM systems,
primarily due to the increasing volume of data entry. Access had
the experience and expertise to integrate our finance system with
GoldMine and the Training Certification database."
Systems Requirements
Mentor's departments - Sales, Operations, Certification, even
the Board of Directors - all had different system needs. As well as
the traditional cross-company CRM requirements, they also needed to
improve the workflow processes between departments, increase
efficiency in certification, and automate the production of
management information. Neil pointed out, "With our previous
system, there were so many manual processes involved, it was a
nightmare to find what we needed."
A streamlined way of working for Mentor
The project started in October 04 and went live in January 05.
Now, when a sales enquiry comes into Mentor, the sales team will
discuss the customer's requirements there and then. All customer
details, conversation notes and correspondence are recorded
centrally within GoldMine.
Customer profiling, data segmentation, targeting and campaign
management have been made much easier to do. The centralised data
storage benefits staff across the company, giving them access to
all the information at their fingertips.
Integration
"It's crucial for Mentor to maintain long-term growth.
We now have the systems in place to support this strategy." Richard Shore
Managing Director
Access wrote a new application for Mentor called Course Manager
to run seamlessly within GoldMine. This allows a sales order to be
completed on screen. Course Manager automatically writes the
booking details into the finance system and an invoice is then sent
to the customer. These used to be time-consuming manual processes,
requiring paperwork and filing.
Today, all this information is stored electronically. Mentor can
now allocate training instructors through a dedicated screen which
also prints or emails the instructors with their workplans.
Finally, certificates are now produced with course manager, and
only once a course has been paid for, thus avoiding delays and
problems with counterfeit certification.
Mentor has achieved fantastic time-savings of 50% - going from 1
1⁄2 hours down to 45 minutes per course booking.
Mentor's Relationship with Access
Neil commented "We have developed a really good relationship
with Access. Their consultants quickly understood the issues we
faced, what we wanted to achieve from the project and how we could
achieve this. We bounced ideas off them, which led to us improving
our original specification to meet more of our requirements. Access
solved all of the issues that arose whilst maintaining the focus on
core requirements and budget.
Finally, working together has helped me to further understand
the scope and functionality of GoldMine and what it can do for us
over the longer term."
Summary
Neil Rose concludes, "It has been hard work to implement the
project with the tight timescales given.
We have had full support from Access and the implementation has run very
smoothly. As many companies will know, when changing business
systems, it can be a big gamble and pretty daunting. But Access'
experience and professionalism has really helped ensure a smooth
changeover."
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