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WIREMOLD COMPANY PROFILE

The Wiremold Company, founded in 1900 and headquartered in West Hartford, Connecticut, is a leading manufacturer of wire and cable management systems, power and data quality products and communications connectivity systems.

Wiremold Limited, its UK subsidiary, was created from its acquisition of Davis, Salamandre, Electrunk, Swifts and Arena-Walsall, all major suppliers to the UK Cable Management Industry. In June 2000, the Wiremold Company became part of LeGrand group.

Rapidly evolving technology and the need for flexibility in the use of space have increased the volume and complexity of electrical and communications cabling in buildings. At the same time owners and operators of buildings are demanding improved aesthetics and lower lifetime costs. Wiremold's aim is to provide cable management solutions to meet these needs. Its drive is to provide end-to-end cabling systems for voice, video, data, control and power.

Wiremold in the UK employs some 300 staff across 6 sites with Head Office, Distribution and manufacturing at West Bromwich, together with a second manufacturing and Distribution unit in Scarborough and Distribution Centres in Leeds, Glasgow, Middlesex and Manchester. Wiremold UK turnover in the region of £60 million.

The Need

Wiremold turnover some £5m per month in the UK with Distribution from 5 sites and Central Accounting at West Bromwich. Proof of Delivery storage was centralised at the time of the merger of the 4 UK businesses (Davis, Salamandre, Electrunk, Swifts and Arena-Walsall) which meant that 3 complete rooms in 3 different buildings were used to store physical POD documentation.

Whenever queries regarding deliveries / despatch and credit / debit notes arose they consumed considerable amounts of human resource in progressing and resolving query issues. This was leading to much time delay and some 300 debit notes per week having to be processed.

The EBC Solution

Steve Heyward, Wiremolds Credit Manager, chose EBC to supply and implement Canon's ScanFile system with one Canon DR3020 duplex A3 scanner. This is network connected and therefore shares information from Despatch with Sales and Credit Control. Wiremold have subsequently freed up the 3 archive rooms for use for other productive purposes.

The Benefits

Steve Heyward comments: "Wiremold were immediately able to reduce and reject the amount of Debit Notes (previously some 300/week) by one third. We can, on receipt of a Debit Note, choose to immediately Fax or email the copy of the scanned POD to counter claims of non receipt of goods. This is because we are network connected and the real-time sharing of scanned information from Despatch, Sales and Credit Control is so easy".

Steve advises that key to the cost effective use of ScanFile was the assistance given by EBC in how to index and hold scanned documents in relation to their use by the different Wiremold user departments. "The back-up and support provided by EBC throughout the selection, implementation and ongoing use of ScanFile, has been excellent. Training has been done in groups of 3-4 people at a time on our site with real live Wiremold documents. This has proved how easy to use the system is and that EBC's simple and straightforward approach has clearly demonstrated the speed and ease of retrieval of documents".

"We have subsequently gone on to link scanned quotation documents by a unique reference number, this has improved our professionalism with customers in that Representatives can respond with a higher level of customer service by cross-referencing the job enquiry and order to the original quotation. Our 25 Reps have the capability to remotely access the data via the Web Browser facility within ScanFile."

Futures

Wiremold are actively evaluating the further use of ScanFile within their Design Department to link in CAD and the additional hand drawn sketches with the order process to assist with customer service and the fast retrieval of shared real-time information.

Similar initiatives are now also being considered for BAR CODE recognition scanning within the order processing cycle to reduce repetitive administrative input and reduce potential for errors.

This exercise will also take into account DIGITAL LASER PRINTING / COPYING which will ultimately reduce the total cost of ownership by reducing the cost of printing. Wiremold have already seen the benefits of using the WEB BROWSER for their Reps, now they are looking at the remote depots and the ability to scan in all incoming post so that information can be stored in individual folders but, where appropriate, be available for sharing throughout the Wiremold in-house network and remote access systems.

In Summary

Wiremold chose EBC, against a number of competitive proposals, because of personal recommendation and their ability to quickly understand the corporate requirements. EBC proposed a cost-effective solution backed up with "Best Practice" advice and attention to working with the customer to address his initial needs as well as proving the flexibility of the system to provide expansion capabilities.