As one of the UK’s leading suppliers of cleaning & hygiene products, Newline helps customers to realise their goal of achieving cleaner, healthier buildings using technology and innovation. Supplying janitorial products to the healthcare, hospitality, leisure, education & some manufacturing sectors, Newline is a family-owned business with 27 years’ experience; and a deep commitment to technical expertise, innovation and service.
Before Using Intact
With their previous system, Vline, in place for a number of years, Newline, a growing janitorial and cleaning company, had simply outgrown the system’s capabilities. As the company grew and sought to further scale its business, they felt limited by Vline’s reporting and general data analysis capabilities and lack of automated workflows and alerts. The team at Newline also found themselves using Excel and other workarounds to overcome some of Vline’s shortcomings.
Pain Points
- Scaling company outgrowing current system’s capabilities
- Inadequate business intelligence, reporting & workflows
- Using workarounds and Excel outside of current system to overcome shortcomings
After Intact iQ
With Intact iQ, Newline has been able to automate numerous company processes and now have a greater understanding of their business which has had a huge impact on the growth of both their branches.
Recently Intact iQ has enabled Newline to quickly shift its business model to react to the COVID pandemic. Rather than having to do a lot of the thinking and analysis themselves, they looked to Intact iQ to extract relevant information to act fast and add new services to their product & service offerings. For example, Newline quickly extracted and reviewed sales in the hospitality sector when the COVID pandemic struck and diverted supplies not required here to other sectors that would be staying open during the lockdown. The agile nature of Intact iQ also allowed them to add new products and services swiftly, e.g. cleaning machine hire, to avail of related opportunities.
With supply chain issues still uncertain, Freddie Coburn, Operations Manager of Newline, appreciates the ease in which you can adjust supplier lead times, recalculate stock levels and orders based on changing trading environments. This in turn benefits their customers when they have the right products in stock, correct stock levels and accurate lead times are given.
The flexibility of Intact iQ has added real value to Newline, as has the automation capabilities which have eliminated numerous mundane tasks with features like task scheduling and report scheduling.
“There was very little friction from staff when we moved to Intact iQ because the benefits were so clear to see. Reports used to be run on spreadsheets. We used to print everything off the system so we were quite paper-based. Our Intact iQ consultant changed our mindset and showed us that we didn’t need to work outside the system or print reports, picking lists etc. We actually don’t use Excel for anything anymore. It’s definitely made life easier for our staff. Overall, the biggest benefit found by all departments is the reporting and the workflow design functionality. It has saved us a lot of time across the business. We trust our processes more too and this has enabled us to delegate other tasks to staff. This also affords us more time to seek out new business opportunities.”
Because Intact iQ makes light work of mass data changes, Newline also enjoys the ease in which they can export data and re-import it into new fields and customised layouts. It’s simple and quick to do in Intact iQ and as far as stock management is concerned, Intact iQ has really opened the potential to run their business more efficiently.
Freddie adds “We have become very proactive with Intact iQ and there is very little we can’t do. It allows us to look at how we can improve the business and action improvements ourselves in the system. This is where Intact iQ really empowers us. When you invest a bit of time into data analysis, form design and customising layouts training, you can quickly make system changes to improve how you do things or introduce new products and services. And this is all without having to go back to Intact.”
All in all, the staff at Newline have fully embraced their Intact iQ system, from their warehouse to telesales and their sales rep team using the Intact Access app to speed up operations and make them more efficient.
“We have total faith in Intact iQ to deliver the information and insights we need when we need it and love that there is so much scope to develop it further. The flexibility it gives us to tailor it to our company’s needs and evolve as our business evolves gives us great confidence that we can continuously improve how we do things to make life even easier for our employees and improve service levels for our customers.’’
Key Benefits
- The autonomy and control to shape the software around their business without needing to revert to Intact
- Reporting, workflow design and tailored control desks
- Total trust in their data for stock movement analysis, auto replenishment and auto replenishment level structures
