Family business Bete, which specialises in distributing industrial spray nozzles, has adopted Claranet to support a staff of 10 home workers.
The approach Bete has taken with its IT has put it in a position to offer specialist warehousing to other small businesses.
The business stocks the spray nozzles in its own warehouse in Nottingham. The main operation involves the home workers taking sales and advising customers on which products to buy.
Software at the warehouse is used to print order dockets, which the warehouse staff use to ship out customer orders.
The firm uses an Orderwise order entry system and Goldmine customer relationship management (CRM) package, which are run remotely via Microsoft terminal services hosted by Claranet.
Claranet also provides multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networking, supporting Voip and data access for home workers. The Voip service provides call routing and call group functionality, where any member of the home working team can pick up an external call.
For a small company, Bete has used quite a sophisticated IT setup. Ivan Zytynski, marketing manager at Bete, previously worked at Claranet, where he gained some experience of what was possible using hosting.
In Zytynski's experience, smaller companies tend to be vulnerable to poor advice from suppliers, which limits the effectiveness of their IT systems. Sometimes the company does not understand what is possible, he said. “A lot of IT projects flounder when the company does not have a clear vision,” added Zytynski.
