Paramount Steel Fence
At your service with
Office 2000 Fax
The Price of Success
Paramount are the UK's largest manufacturers of steel security fencing, supplying to a range
of construction companies, local authorities and utility companies for projects as diverse
as special architectural fencing, park gardens and even crematoria.
"The price of success is that you are constantly having to find ways of coping with ever
higher levels of customer expectation," said Bob Dewberry, Managing Director of Paramount
Steel Fence. "In our business, every enquiry and quotation is a "one-off". Often our customers
provide us with a speci-fication, we quote, then they may revise the specification a number
of times before the project is finalised."
With this in mind, Paramount have increasingly used faxes as a mechanism for sending out
quotations, but it became apparent that there could be improvements.
"The fax still needed to be followed up with a proper letter on our letterhead -
and this often arrived after the customer had already started revising their specification.
Basically, things would get out-of-step! Also, there were far too many queues forming at
the fax machines and incoming faxes couldn't get through for people trying to send quotations out."
Paramount turned to Centreline 2000 for advice. The company uses a Dell computer running
SCO UNIX and Uniplex Business Software. "We have used Uniplex for over 5 years, we know
how configurable it is and we knew there had to be a way of automating the business process."
Fast Quotes
"What we really needed was a way of composing and sending the quotation rapidly. We wanted
to be able to handle follow-up queries and modifications, preferably while the prospective
customer was still on the phone to us."
"Further the system had to log quotes and revisions as well as producing professional output,
including the company logo and letterhead details."
Since April, Paramount have been using Office 2000 Fax in conjunction with Uniplex Business
Software - with remarkable results.
Bob Dewberry explains how the systems works. "All our quotation and pricing information is
held in standard spreadsheet templates. When we are asked to quote, we fill in the
customer-specific details and the system automatically generates an accurate and attractive
fax quotation and sends it directly from the computer using Office 2000 Fax.
The resultant quote contains the correct logo and letterhead information.
Also, the system logs and produces a hardcopy for our records."
Impressed Customers
Dewberry is delighted with the results. "The new system is superb. In terms of service,
the customer is often still chatting to us on the telephone as our revised quotation is
arriving on their fax machine. That impresses them."
"In terms of productivity, it has saved us exceptional amounts of time. For example, we
are now handling more quotations and enquiries per week with 3 office staff than we
previously did with 4."
"Everything we send out is indexed by a reference number. If someone calls with a pricing query,
we can search the system on the spot using the reference number and bring up the correspondence
on the screen then and there."
"The whole process is automated - and it really works! We use Office 2000 Fax for all our
outgoing messages and this leaves the old fax machine free for incoming messages."
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