Mardi Gras Event Hire supplies event organisers with everything needed for a successful occasion - from marquee hire, table settings and glassware to party supplies such as balloons, streamers and costume accessories.
The company covers an area with a 50-70 km radius of the city of Hastings, where its depot is based, in the Hawke's Bay region of New Zealand’s North Island. Its nine-strong team expands during its peak busy period in summer. Typical customer events would include the Mercedes Benz Wine Awards run by the local agricultural society, various summer festivals, a pop concert or a family celebration.
The Challenge
Managing Director, Greg Gilmour, took over the company recently and made it a priority to refresh the company’s IT strategy: “We needed a solid technology strategy to get ourselves back on track and manage our fleet more efficiently if we were to weather the recession and serve our loyal client base well.”
The company had been previously using an old DOS-based system. Even with the option to upgrade it, Greg knew it would not offer the required level of reporting, effective inventory management and availability planning. In addition, he felt it was important to go down the Microsoft Windows-based route: “All our staff are familiar with Windows, which would make a replacement system easier to adopt and use.”
Seeing a demonstration of the MCS-rm hire system and having the opportunity to try it out made Greg recognise that it could fit the bill: “I was very impressed by its functionality and could see that it offered many best practices and processes to support the operation of an event hire business. The system offered the ease of use and simplicity that we wanted and would also be professionally installed and supported by MCS.”
The Solution
Greg needed the new system to be up and running in just six weeks. He was very pleased with the service MCS provided: “MCS moved heaven and earth to get the fundamentals of a working system in place to a very challenging deadline!"
The MCS installation team was central to executing a smooth and successful implementation. "We started from scratch at the implementation stage, with MCS building the platform and then importing all the spreadsheets, data and templates”, comments Greg. “It was made so easy for us. All the initial online training was straightforward and, as we had hoped, our users found the system very fast and easy to pick up.”
Initially, Mardi Gras took a four-user system, which is likely to expand to five in the near future, with two users on the hire counter and two in the general office/back office.
The Benefits
Greg is pleased by the way in which MCS-rm supports his team in offering exceptional customer service: "We’re happy that MCS-rm does everything that we want and have been impressed with its uniform processes and structure. The system has helped to promote consistent quality management processes across the business. Now all quotes, contracts and picking lists use the same format, and pricing and invoicing are done in an identical way, whoever takes the order. We also have precise management of our hire contracts, deliveries and collections.”
As Greg points out, the key thing in an events hire business is inventory control: “With MCS-rm, we know where everything is at any point in time and what volume is left to hire out. We can turn items around quickly to ensure maximum utilisation, while the availability planner tells us what is available at any given time and what is booked out in the future.”
Greg goes on to say, "We store and manage all our event hire stock on the system. Our inventory runs into many thousands of items with high volumes and challenging turnaround times. I love the way the availability planner helps us to manage this. It lets us drill down to see where everything is, so we can make an informed judgement on what stock needs to be allocated in the future. We are quoting on jobs years ahead, into 2014, so this helps us to plan accurately for the future, which in turn maximises profits. It's all about control and we have that now with MCS-rm.”
The system also handles breakages and losses. “It’s brilliant!” says Greg. “When items are returned, we mark off on the system any that are no longer part of our stock and the system automatically takes it off the inventory count. It’s a great time-saver and helps us to keep an accurate picture of our inventory.”
With the majority of the customer quotes being done over the internet, another helpful feature is the flexibility MCS-rm offers to manipulate forms and documents. Greg says, “We can customise document formats, including adding terms and conditions and service tax, translating the information into a format that is easy to read and understand, however our clients view it."
The Future
Greg agrees that there are many MCS-rm capabilities still to be explored: "I can see that in the near future we’ll start developing reports specific to our business and perhaps think about using untapped functionality such as the Customer Web Portal. This will be a big advantage."
The next major step is to bring the retail arm of the business into MCS-rm, with the additional management of sales and purchasing. Greg goes on to explain, "We will eventually replace our counter-top PCs and perhaps use tablet technology. I am very excited about the prospect of ‘going mobile’ and enabling our customers to order and pay remotely over the internet. There is huge potential – we know we are only scratching the surface of everything that MCS-rm can offer.”
To find out how MCS-rm could help your business, call us on +44 (0)1628 828000 or use our enquiry form.
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