Customer Spotlight: Specialist Crafts

UK-based Specialist Crafts is a distributor and retailer of arts and handicraft materials – more than 16,000 products – serving educationalists and care professionals in schools, universities, occupational health departments and social service centers.

Sister site Homecrafts is a leading internet retail site targeting artists and hobbyists across the UK and Ireland.

Having grown significantly and developed multiple channels to market, Specialist Crafts’ objectives for both businesses were primarily to establish a single reliable product record and enable accurate and timely publishing of products to their websites and multiple product catalogs.

The marketing team at Specialist Crafts has been highly effective over recent years, with the company enjoying year on year growth. The team, however,  had identified processes, in both marketing and product data management areas, that if not promptly addressed would limit longer term effectiveness and threaten ongoing growth and profitability.  These issues are common to many companies with large portfolios of products:

• Complex data processes associated with product proposal and introduction.
• Tying up systems staff in troubleshooting, prolonging time to market.
• Protracted catalog production processes, involving unwieldy effort and costing valuable time for key staff, constraining overall marketing effort.
• Disconnected processes for product data maintenance for printed publications supporting online channels.

Customized Agility Modular Interface (AMI) workspaces for users in many departments – from product management through to call center and warehousing – have sped adoption of Agility.

AMI is uniquely designed to fit the system to the users,  rather than vice versa, facilitating immediate, dramatic improvements to consistency and workflow.

Significant time and resources have been saved across data management, ecommerce and printed catalog production.

Agility DI has been used to create web feed

Agility will soon begin feeding data into the company’s Sanderson ERP product.

In the near future, Specialist Crafts will further extend their investment in Agility by creating a product proposal and acceptance extension to their ERP. Using Agility as the item master for supplier data, much of the effort involved in new product creation will be moved onto their suppliers, saving yet more time and resources and enabling them to focus on value-adding activities.