In-House at the Panelling Centre – one of Ireland’s foremost suppliers of kitchens and bedrooms uses K8

In 2007, In-House at the Panelling Centre chose to review their IT systems' strategy. Technology had moved on, the business had grown and they wanted to provide a slicker and more efficient service to their customers.

Stephen O’Donoghue, Commercial Development Manager said, “Our previous trading system had no CAD integration. Everything specified by the design tools had to be re-keyed. It was inefficient, often resulting in errors and inaccuracies. Furthermore, we didn’t have full control of our accounts as a result of using our parent company’s systems and management reporting wasparticularly challenging.”

In-House at the Panelling Centre needed a high functional, fully integrated system with the necessary tools and facilities to take the business forward. “We looked at alternative systems and chose K8. It ticked all boxes and had the credibility of other leading suppliers among its user base. The clincher was the development of CAD integration.”

Kerridge Commercial Systems is committed to the provision of new technologies which give its customers better value and long term benefit. Some developments are best deployed by partnering with a third party specialists. Working with the Kerridge Commercial Systems team, In-House at the Panelling Centre was the first to implement K8 CAD integration.

“We are now able to design a kitchen, pass the component requirements directly to K8 and produce a professional quotation for the customer. No re-keying, no errors and profit margins are protected by using a single database of stock and component information.”
The comprehensive K8 stock control tools enable users to achieve significant improvements in the quality of their stock position with benefits that extend to the bottom line.

“K8 has helped us enormously in optimising our stock. We now review demand history reports and use K8 ordering controls to balance stock by using the inter-branch ordering function. Our daily perpetual inventory routines are much tighter, giving us much better results and with more accurate information, we have much more confidence in the system and so are able to deliver a higher standard of service. With lower stock holding there is less capital tied up and that’s a cost saving.”

K8 is easy to use, its menu system with drop downs is very intuitive to navigate. Stephen mentioned that as many of their products are quite technical, their staff appreciate the web-enabled look-up facility where, from within the sales order processing application, one-click to the designated URL gives the operator all the information he needs to resolve a particular query.
Clearly, profitability is the key metric to show that a business is moving forward. K8 has helped enable many of its users to grow and In-House at the Panelling Centre is no exception. “Since installing K8 we have added 3 more branches and it’s been straightforward to expand the system accordingly. K8 has enabled us to be much more efficient, we can now ensure that complementary products are sold together which improves both revenue and profitability.”
Helping to make day to day trading as efficient as possible is a core capabilities of K8. The system is also an effective management information and reporting tool. In House at the Panelling Centre have successfully harnessed this functionality and have set-up advanced analysis reports. With accurate, timely information their managers can make quick decisions. “We are using K8 to control our profit margins with pre-set minima in place. Overall profitability can be reviewed at high level and if necessary drill down to the details.”
Kerridge Commercial Systems believes that good system management starts with robust security and high levels of reliability. There is full control over who can access specific parts of the system and managing each user profile is easy to maintain.

“We have installed network resilience so that we can still trade if there is a communications failure. Looking ahead, centralising delivery and optimising route planning are work in progress projects and some further K8 add-ons will improve the value of our investment."

K8 has clearly helped the company to have much greater control of the business, there are tighter processes are in place, trading is more efficient and customers are enjoying the benefits of a higher standard of service.