Phocas Gives Obex Protection the ultimate data solution

Evolution of BI solutions

When the company first started, it was using Sage and Act to manage its data analytics, combining the two to help the sales team review the history of customers’ purchases. The integrated system was limited, not allowing users to drill into the data to find out margins or buying patterns. It was a simple solution that identified the sales value of each customer, but not much more. The company then brought in Sales-i, which bolted onto Sage.

“Sales-i was the next step in our BI evolution, but we quickly learned that it was not going to give us what we needed,” said Tom Francis, Managing Director of Obex.

“With a mobile sales team and international offices in Australia and France, we needed something more flexible. While Sales-i is cloud-based and they offer a dedicated app, it is not very intuitive and provides an entirely different experience than the desktop version.”

The international workforce was a key driver in looking for a new BI system, and Tom found Phocas through UBT.

“We selected Phocas because of its flexibility and the ability we have to customize the software to fit the various needs of our departments,” added Tom. “The Phocas team worked carefully with teams across Obex to give them the ultimate data solution.” 

Integrating Phocas throughout the company

Currently, six people on the Obex team use Phocas on a daily basis, including sales and purchasing. The company is in the process of also rolling out to the production team, which will add another 2-4 users.

In addition to monitor future sales orders, future purchase orders going in and out, Obex users lean on Phocas’ favorites and alerts functionality and make frequent use of Phocas Dashboards. Among the key uses of the Phocas system include:

• Sales Invoices
• Sales Orders
• Stock
• Purchase Invoices
• Purchase Orders
• Demand Quantity of their bill of materials.
• General Ledger

Every morning, individual rep sales results from the previous day are automatically sent to each rep which removes the need to manually add up the totals. This report is the first thing the sales team reviews in its morning stand-up meeting. They also use Phocas to monitor declining customers and track customer buying patterns, as well as for margin analysis. Obex calls it ‘saving customers’ as Phocas allows the sale team to see who has and hasn’t ordered each month.

Tom added, “With Phocas, you can quickly spot customers who haven’t ordered for a few months, which gives us a chance to phone them about the decrease in orders. In some instances, this will reveal that they may have received cheaper pricing from a competitor, allowing us to revisit pricing.”

The purchasing team uses Phocas for a consolidated stock report that includes stock forecasting, stock usage and demand planning.

“We’ve had issues with non-stock items and consumer products not always pulling through on the Sage report,” said Tom. “Phocas is helpful because with a single-click we can pull every get everything we need on a single dashboard or report.”