The Lightworks is part of a family owned and run business which was established in 1966 and has progressed into a leading supplier of innovative lighting sourced from around the world and distributed to the trade. The company is the sole UK distributor for the award winning Pando cooker hoods and are the sole distributor in the UK and ROI for Eyeleds. They have a strong ethos of providing quality products and service to their customers, continually seeking improvement by embracing technologies that will benefit both parties.

“We identified that the future for placing orders had to be the electronic route” Roy Hughes MD of The Lightworks. “The industry has too long made do with traditional paper based orders at best re typed from the quotation, at worst scribbled on a scrap of paper and then faxed” Roy adds “the potential for errors at both ends is huge….transcription issues, illegibility, inaccurate data combine to impact our operational costs and at the same time erode our customers profits”.

Although this issue was identified, a solution was not actively sort as the belief was that getting the majority of their customers to make a financial investment to overcome this would be too much of a challenge. A number of their retailers were already using the KBBConnect® online quoting and ordering service developed by SMART Systems. It was after being invited to make their pricelists available with this service that the realisation dawned that here was a solution to the ordering problem! “We now sponsor our pricelist on the KBBConnect® service for a nominal monthly fee. There are no hardware requirements by either party other than that already in place together with broadband connectivity. There is no additional workload on our part for maintaining the pricelist as we are already carrying this out for our printed versions. As we sponsor the product data, our retailers can use KBBConnect® for free; not just for our lighting products but for complete Kitchen, Bathroom or Bedroom projects, sourcing other components from otherparticipating suppliers. In addition, there is an easy look up for technical details as it crossreferences direct to our web pages.”

The Light works can adjust the online product data at will through SMART’s secure online repository KBBLink, ensuring that prices are always correct at point of quotation. Being automatic, once the quotation is agreed, the system extracts the information by supplier, compiles an order and sends it as appropriate for processing.

“We are so impressed with the potential of this service that eventually we plan for the KBBConnect® file to be routed directly into our Sales Order processing system. Roy concludes “We find it very gratifying that our investment in something which we knew could benefit us commercially could equally add to our value proposition to our customers”