Customer success stories

Brandlines, which imports and distributes confectionery and grocery products throughout New Zealand and Australia, was challenged by its unconnected line-of-business systems. These systems forced employees to perform redundant data entry and reconciliation tasks. To retain its business with global suppliers, better control its sales processes, and improve efficiency overall, Brandlines needed to integrate and standardize its financial, distribution, and reporting solutions. Here's how the company did just that.

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With a severe recession looming, this German outdoor equipment and apparel manufacturer needed to make significant improvements in the way it managed its key customer-centric processes. Its fax-based ordering system was slow and unresponsive and had become outdated. Things are different now. Discover how Microsoft Business Solutions—Navision software helped this company better manage ordering and shipping and dramatically turn itself around financially.

Lorentzen & Stemoco (L&S) is an Oslo, Norway-based shipping brokerage whose 73 skilled personnel serve clients 24 hours a day. For L&S brokers, access to real-time market and client information is critical: data from global contacts generates the best deals for clients. But L&S’s disparate global systems made it difficult to access and share information, so the company standardized on Microsoft technologies to create an integrated communications system. See how its brokers now benefit from anytime, anywhere access to customer information through Microsoft Office programs, as well as an information portal built on Windows SharePoint Services.

The high demand for wireless phones has more than doubled the number of customers in five years at Midwest Wireless, a wireless provider based in Mankato, Minn. Critical to enabling Midwest Wireless to manage such rapid growth is the company-wide business process re-engineering effort that started in 2001 and continues today. In an effort to increase its ability to provide a regional customer base with a higher level of service than national providers, Midwest Wireless introduced Microsoft Business Solutions CRM. See the results.

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The launch of an e-commerce Web site in 1999 transformed this struggling rural printer in Livingston, Mont., into a fast-growing and profitable operation. With a growth rate greater than 186 percent per year, the company had been included on the Inc. Magazine list of America’s 500 fastest-growing private companies for three years in a row. But by 2001, this incredible growth was placing increased strain on company systems. For example, its handwritten, disorganized order ticketing process was damaging customer relationships. Here’s how Printingforless.com overcame these and other problems with the help of Microsoft solutions.

Universal Footwear, a growing fashion importer and distributor based in South Africa, specializes in competitively priced footwear and accessories. The company’s manufacturing and distribution networks span the globe. But like many midsize businesses, although Universal’s information technology (IT) infrastructure had evolved over the years, each aspect had not been integrated with the others. This resulted in inaccurate reporting, unauthorized spending, manual processes, lack of control over data, poor access to information, and inefficient global communications. Find out how Microsoft helped this company address and resolve these issues by integrating its operations worldwide.