NetSuite dials up biggest UK win
CRM-Forum
6/30/05

Opal Telecom, a subsidiary of The Carphone Warehouse, has signed up for one thousand NetSuite user seats, making it the on demand firm's biggest UK customer to date.

With headquarters in Warrington and divisions in Manchester, London, The West Midlands, Glasgow and Belfast, Opal Telecom offers voice services primarily to the corporate and SME (small and medium sized enterprises) market in the UK.

"In the past, our processes were complex and paper-based and we did not have an organised business, customer, and order management product," said Clive Dorsman, Technical Director of Opal Telecom. "NetSuite has given us a much simpler yet powerful Web-based electronic workflow capability and information management visibility, and we're now beginning to see the results from it. We look forward to benefiting from NetSuite's entire process productivity suite as we progress."

The company is phasing in its NetSuite implementation. It is already using order management, partner relationship management and expense reporting functions.

Phil Haslam, Customer Operations Director at Opal Telecom, said one of the key reasons the company chose NetSuite was to simplify the sales order management process. This includes significantly reducing the company's order entry error-ratio and also reducing the time to generate an order. In addition, Opal Telecom's entire partner and retail network eventually will be able to tap in to NetSuite over the Internet to create the orders.

"NetSuite gives us one platform to bring in all the disparate systems together, both from an internal sales perspective, and from our extensive partner and dealer communities," said Haslam. "From what we were doing previously, that's a fantastic leap forward."

NetSuite's UK Professional Services team has worked with Opal Telecom's IT department to customise NetSuite using Java script and other tools apart of the NetSuite NetFlex platform. One example of this customisation has been to put rules into Opal's post code validation process to drive down the risk of error. Now if an Opal employee applies for carrier pre-selection (CPS), and types in the wrong post code, a "failure" message will pop up and that employee will know they need to resubmit.