Meet White Furniture. The company profile: wholesale supplies of medical equipment and consumables (bet you too thought of something else, judging by the company name) to special care institutions.

A disclaimer: their website design is a sole decision of the company owner. Ultimate and affiliated companies have taken NO part in its development. ​

Ultimate e-Trade was implemented in 2010, virtually, at inception. As a result of business processes reengineering performed together with the customer, as the main barrier to company’s growth at that point we defined the level of customer service – low quality of purchase order fulfilment (namely delayed deliveries, low percentage of orders completed, etc.). These problems, in turn, resulted from:

1. a complicated and confusing chain of supply, which is characteristic of the industry. Indeed, a typical medical center purchase order would include hundreds of items from dozens of manufacturers from different countries or even continents. A significant number of items is made to order. It takes months to complete a single purchase order, that is, if no management flaws are involved. Moreover, terms of payment may differ depending on equipment type and terms of delivery.
2. a low level of the company’s business processes, primarily, goods and cash flow accounting, as applied to a rather harsh real setting. The fact that the main accounting instrument was MS Excel (more precisely, hundreds of excel files) says it all.

In e-Trade, goods and cash flow accounting for this particular project was done on a per project basis – as opposed to the usual practice in trading companies, when everything is counterparty- and waybill-oriented. Now, the new main accounting object was the customer purchasing order, around which system users handled relevant deliveries and shipments, payments, analytic instruments such as custom reports on order completion percentage or profits on selected orders, etc.

The White Furniture business grew by more than 10 times during the three years after the e-Trade implementation. A relatively small supplier then, the company has turned into one of the biggest players on the market. The business owner attributes no less than one third of the growth to the effect of the e-Trade implementation: thanks to this easy-to-use and reliable instrument, the company became the market leader in service quality and a credible supplier.
We’re not even covering bonuses from the e-Trade implementation that are trivial for such cases, like customer loyalty growth thanks to easy-to-use online ordering forms, etc., although they did act the part, if compared to their competitors’ clumsy services.

To summarize: when the business owner compared the total amount of investments into the e-Trade (the implementation itself, equipment and support) during the whole period of its operation with the proportionate growth of profits, the resulting ROI value was over 150% per year.

Translated into English: the total costs of the system operation paid off one and half times each year, meaning a 500% return on investment since the start of operation.

Totally, the numbers talk.

We could, of course, ask our renowned colleagues something of sorts regarding disclosing similar performance indicators, but…

Well, you do understand.