Rodmatic targets business efficiency through cloud system investment

Explains Rodmatic's managing director, Richard Newborough: "Sales in the company have grown over the last 18 months, with our volume production business growing by 50%, giving us shipping targets of 500,000 components a week. At the same time, our high technology machining operation has expanded by 50%. This has pressurised our internal systems, leading to duplication of effort, poor utilisation of resources and risk of downgrading our capability as a subcontract component manufacturer." The new system will give real-time access, from a single source, for sales and customer service, accounting, production data and scheduling, diary actions and automated historical information of events, allowing the management and sales team access to data anywhere in the world. The Salesforce CRM Sales Cloud system will also better enable internal communications and, in the next phase, eliminate outsourcing of IT services and reliance on internal servers. Up to 90% of Rodmatic's production at Reading is exported to fluid power, automotive and marine sectors, and enquiries coming through the website were being submerged amongst some 20,000 junk mail items received each month. In addition, much information was being carried in people's heads, individual note books and a variety of different systems that slowed communication and information exchange and, being largely people-based, was not always perfect, leading to delayed decisions and errors. The installation of Salesforce CRM by AstarCloud of Paddington in West London at the Reading factory of Rodmatic involved certain customisation through its business-trained specialists. This enabled the system to be adapted to suit the manufacturing environment. Mr Newborough describes the solution as "being very pure in its approach, highly flexible and, most important, very simple to use to retrieve information".