Case Study

Company: Total Hire & Sales Ltd
Web: www.totalhireandsales.co.uk
Country: United Kingdom
Industry: Plant Hire
Products:
• MCS-rm with:
• Purchase Ordering
• Workshop & Maintenance
• MCS-fin
• MCS-bi

Founded in 1994, Total Hire & Sales is part of a large East Midlands building and civil engineering company operating out of five depots throughout the region. The company specialises in the hire and sales of building equipment, power tools and materials for the construction industry, from DIY tools to major building equipment.

The Challenge
The company’s simple stock control system was under pressure to manage and control the increasingly complex business.

A solution was sought that would be easy to operate, useful to a wide range of staff and co-ordinate all the business-critical financial data into one central system.

Carl Tidey, Director and General Manager at Total Hire & Sales, claimed it was an easy decision: “I had been using the MCS hire management solution at A-Plant Hire for several years and was impressed with its functionality and ease-of-use - especially its integrated financials application. This delivered all the accountancy and management capability we needed so we immediately set about implementing the MCS system at Total.”

The Solution
Carl and his colleagues worked closely with MCS to implement the hire management solution, MCS-rm, and create a perfect fit with the company’s operation.

First of all, Total Hire & Sales implemented the core functionality of MCS-rm including Contract Management, Assets, Invoicing, Stock, Depots, Purchase Ordering and Rehire.

Once the system was embedded, Carl set about activating MCS-fin, the integrated MCS financial package as well as MCS-bi, the business intelligence reporting and analysing capability.

On top of this, Carl and his management colleagues were keen to establish proper control over the company’s plant and equipment maintenance programmes. They activated the MCS Workshop & Maintenance function to enable a comprehensive, integrated repair and maintenance schedule for all the company’s plant and equipment.

Carl continued: “Within four weeks, we had implemented all the capability we needed, trained 14 staff across all five depots and become fully operational with no problems at all.”

The Benefits
The main benefits of MCS-rm to the hire and sales company was its ability to deliver rapid efficiency and productivity gains across the operation.

“The big thing for us was having access to the live plant inventory,” Carl claimed. “Our parent company is our biggest customer, so they appreciate the amount of critical information we can access at any time. Another major benefit to them is that important data is continuously being updated in real-time. It’s easy to create reports that can give an accurate analysis of business transactions, call up invoices, raise queries, do stock checks and monitor and amend live contracts all at a touch of a button. Our old system couldn’t do any of that.”

“The other major advantage for us was having the integrated financial package,”   Carl reported. “As it is part of the MCS-rm portfolio of products, MCS-fin was cost-effective and saved us searching for a reliable third party accounts package. Having all the features of a large, multi-dimensional package, MCS-fin handles all our complex multi-depot accountancy processes with ease.”

With MCS-fin, accounts are up to date and reflect the current position across the entire company. Users can also directly drill back to real-time data contained in the core MCS-rm system. For instance, you can view, amend or add information to an existing contract, scrutinise the status of a product or analyse any invoice direct from the financials application.

“We can view and access contract information in MCS-rm simply and quickly for much better management and control of our accounts,” Carl said. “In every way, the integrated financials within MCS-rm not only saves us time and money but also reduces the risk of errors and helps us resolve possible conflicts faster.”

“This,”  Carl added, “contributes to better customer management and has, consequently, improved customer relations.”

Furthermore, Total Hire & Sales benefit from MCS’ one-stop-shop support for their entire software solution. One support company means that queries can be resolved more efficiently as there is no need to juggle between different suppliers. This also saves money by reducing the cost associated with multiple support agreements.

The Future
Carl stated that Total Hire & Sales will next be increasing the usage of the Workshop & Maintenance function by getting all workshop foremen fully operational on MCS-rm. This will give them a clearer view of the status of the equipment including when it needs to be serviced or repaired. A cost analysis delivers the added benefit of highlighting how much each item costs to keep it running.

“We have plans to expand the solution to more users, more sites and more branches,” Carl concluded. “With the addition of a new depot in 2010, we see the use of MCS-rm increasing and delivering benefits to our entire operation.”

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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