aWorkbook Case Studies

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CRAFT chooses aWorkbook for digital catalogues Leading Swedish functional sports apparel brand CRAFT has selected aWorkbook, a laptop and iPad based solution for assortment planning and selling, for use by its distributors in North America, Europe, Asia and Oceania.

Christine Sandstedt, Manager of International Marketing Projects at CRAFT said: “The main reason for CRAFT choosing to work with aWorkbook is that it is a perfect sell-in tool for our distributors. It’s a flexible and adaptable digital publishing solution for our international catalogue requirements. And it gives us direct time and cost savings because now we don’t have to print and distribute hard copy printed catalogues world-wide.” aWorkbook, from UK based Hark Solutions, is the only cross platform sales enablement tool designed for the apparel and footwear industries. Using aWorkbook, sales representatives can plan an assortment for their customers, working interactively with a pool of data of the entire product line, to create a dynamic digital catalogue assortment for a customer.

About CRAFT Swedish brand CRAFT is a producer of functional sports apparel. The company is based in Boras, an old, traditional textile industry town in the South of Sweden.

The initial concept of founder Anders Bengtsson was to develop underwear, which propels moisture away from the skin during physical activity – and thus guarantees the perfect microclimate. CRAFT started with technical base layers and soon developed the three layer principle with a 2nd layer of insulation and moisture transportation and an outer shell for protection. Today, the company offers gear for all kinds of sports focussing on running, alpine skiing, bike and cross-country skiing.

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NZ’s

Icebreaker breaking ice globally on new sales enablement solution

• Efficient and time saving • Cross-platform is a “must-have” for us • Use it for product range planning • Assortment selling is smarter • aWorkbook is a central hub for resources New Zealand’s pioneering merino wool apparel brand Icebreaker is shaking up the fiercely competitive world of outdoor apparel, equipping its global field sales team with an innovative laptop and iPad based solution

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We have quickly achieved something very cool looking, intuitive and yet incredibly powerful and flexible.

called aWorkbook for assortment planning and selling. More than 80 of Icebreaker’s account managers and some distributors are using the system across 12 of the 43 countries Icebreaker is sold in to drive their assortment selling. The project rolled out in just 4-5 weeks in early 2012. aWorkbook, from UK based Hark Solutions, is the only cross platform sales enablement tool designed for the apparel and footwear industries. Using aWorkbook, sales representatives can plan an assortment for their customers, working interactively with a pool of data of the entire product line, to create a dynamic digital catalogue assortment for a customer.

Sarah Sherriff, Strategic Projects Director for Icebreaker said, “The sales team was looking for tools to help them sell more effectively and to improve their efficiency. We knew assortment selling would build the relationship with our customers and that over several seasons it would have a positive impact on sales. We had ventured into assortment selling, which for us was about making a better commercial presentation to our customers, rather than the old school way of selling.”

“We were labouring away with PowerPoint slides of our products and it worked but it wasn’t at all dynamic and if you got feedback from the customer it wasn’t easy to go back and change what you had done. It took our account managers hours to do this for each sell-in presentation. It was a major time sink at certain critical points in the year.”

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With aWorkbook the sales team is more efficient in preparing for their meetings.

“We thought there must be a better way. We looked at several options, some costing significantly more - from NZD 400,000 to NZD 4 million over three years. The numbers were pretty ridiculous. We thought there must be an app in the app store that does this, and we were so pleased to find aWorkbook.”

“We didn’t want any barriers to adoption. One of the benefits of aWorkbook was we could very quickly get some wins on the board for the sales team while we are installing both an ERP and a PLM system elsewhere in the business, which are consuming IT/IS resources but have little to no direct benefit for the sales team. With aWorkbook the sales team is more efficient in preparing for their meetings.”

“Due to the other systems under development, we just couldn’t put in something that needed integration. The aWorkbook rollout was about getting quick wins for the account managers versus doing nothing. We found with aWorkbook the solution was relatively low cost, low impact for deployment, yet able to generate substantial quick wins across the business. aWorkbook really suited Icebreaker’s philosophy of the rapid prototyping model. We were very quickly able to get success with a small group and extend it.”

Project status Icebreaker has rolled out aWorkbook across its entire product line of over 900 products style colours, using it in each market worldwide. The project was rolled out in just 4-5 weeks, using the equivalent of just one full time project manager for five weeks.

“Working with Hark Solutions we were able to easily get our data into the system using XML and familiar business software like Excel.”

“We’re using aWorkbook across 12 of the 43 countries Icebreaker is sold in. Implementation was very straight forward.

Usually we have 500-1000 style colours per season and we’re now onto our second season with aWorkbook. One of our distributors wanted it too so we have opened it up for them too.”

“We’ve broken down our range into separate catalogues, creating one aWorkbook catalogue for each market due to varying pricing structures, imagery and brand promises from market to market. In some markets it’s more relevant to show certain attributes. aWorkbook lets us do that so we can slice and dice our assortment for each market. For example some markets are more interested in showing silhouette, colour or perhaps price point ranges. aWorkbook gives us the flexibility to approach it for each market.”

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“We went from project green light to deployment in the field within 4-5 weeks. We had this goal but we didn’t think we’d be able to do it. Some of the time was just tidying up our data, we could have deployed it in just two weeks otherwise. We dealt with Hark Solutions using Skype and email. We’ve never met face to face.

We’ve worked in multiple time zones and Hark has been one of the best vendors we’ve ever worked with. They’ve been brilliant.”

“We decided to go with one market at a time, and started with Australia first,

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aWorkbook is the one stop shop to hold everything the sales team needs.

and then rolled it out to the US, Canada and Europe. We shared success from market to market and just followed their sales meetings and seasons. We got success with a small group and extended it. We didn’t have to launch it all at once.”

The Solution Running on iPads and laptops and desktops, aWorkbook digital catalogues are populated with the product specifications and photography for the entire product range. The data structure gives us the ability to filter on product attributes like gender, product hierarchy (layering), consumer activity (run, hike, snow), inventory promise (replenishment style etc), colours and so on.

“We also have campaign assets such as product photography, key looks, seasonal photography and videos, technical sales sheets and other reference materials for the sales reps. Now we can break up our entire range for a customer and plan an assortment say just for outdoor, or just for running and plan what we want a store to take.”

“We’re using it as soon as we can get 2D line drawings and information before we even think about the customer. So it really starts during the prototyping phase, letting the markets select what is right for their market.”

“Before aWorkbook all of this was in a bunch of different places. Now its all in one hub. - aWorkbook is the one stop shop to hold everything the sales team needs. We’d like to expand further into product displays in store, for example, which fixtures are required for different products.”

“We’re creating the rules in the business, not the tool. aWorkbook is surprisingly powerful yet easy to use, even for the technophobes. About 15-20 per cent of our users are on iPads, while most are using the app on laptops. Back in the office, it also runs on desktop computers. This cross platform functionality was really important to us and a major reason why we went with aWorkbook.”

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Use in the field “Using aWorkbook, our account managers can go to a customer, such as a ski store, and we can just show the customer the physical apparel assortment relevant to them along with the accompanying PDF rather than flipping through the whole catalog.”

“The account managers love it because it saves them loads of time, and makes them look good. It helps them focus on the thought process for each customer, rather than wasting time on formatting. It makes them more efficient and helps them respond to the customer during a range showing. We were able to train the account managers in just 30 minutes.”

“One of our sales representatives said it was a million times better than PowerPoint. I think they’re pleasantly surprised with aWorkbook we’ve quickly achieved something very cool looking, intuitive and yet incredibly powerful and flexible.”

“Account managers can use aWorkbook to generate a PDF of their assortment which can be emailed off to the customer, right from the app. In the past we just had printouts from Powerpoint with a bunch of scribbles. aWorkbook has changed all that.”

“Not only that, but we can show more information to the customer than with a printed catalogue. For example before we might just have one product photo in a printed catalogue. In aWorkbook we can have a lot more, showing details of the product graphics or fabric contrasts. Sometimes the physical product sample on hand is not final, so we can show the customer the final item in the aWorkbook solution. It doesn’t replace selling, just gives us a few more assets along the way to the sale.”

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The account managers love it because it saves them loads of time, and makes them look good.

“For us one of the biggest shifts has been to use aWorkbook in Europe to sell using the assortment selling philosophy. It’s a new concept for our team and that’s the biggest win for us. It’s helping us sell in new ways and appear more professional, in a market where we’re just getting recognised. aWorkbook helps us stand out from the crowd.”

Future Plans “Different markets globally are at different stages of adoption of B2B tools so we wanted to start with some easy wins and build from there, so we started with the assortment planning functionality.”

“Next season we’ll be using the order functionality more, where sales reps can place an email order from aWorkbook during their customer meeting, using the solution as a sell in tool for order capture,” said Sarah Sherriff.

Contact us to get started with aWorkbook T: +44 (0)1460 279744 F: +44 (0)1460 271783 | info@aworkbook.com | www.aworkbook.com

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aWorkbook app helps fabled Hawaiian brand Tori Richard breeze into the future It’s easy to think of tropical islands as a relaxed place far from the latest technologies, but nothing could be further from the truth.

From its home in Honolulu, iconic Hawaiian resortwear brand Tori Richard is transforming its sales operations using a cross platform solution running on iPads, Macs and PCs. The application, called aWorkbook, is by UK-based developer Hark Solutions. The program automates Tori Richard’s sales orders, dramatically improving the speed and accuracy of orders placed by its sale representatives out in the field.

Founded in 1956, Tori Richard, Ltd. is still a family business, driven with a unique legacy of vibrant globally inspired prints and tropical style.

In December 2008, Tori Richard became one of the world’s first solar powered apparel manufacturers and retailers and has expanded it’s power generation in 2011 to ¼ megawatts.

Tori Richard President Josh Feldman said, “The fundamental problem however was our order writing and order entry processing was still completely manual.

There was a lot of multiple entry of orders, a lot of handling of paper orders before they were entered into our ERP system”.

aWorkbook solution aWorkbook is the only cross platform sales enablement tool designed for the apparel and footwear industries. Using aWorkbook, sales representatives can plan an assortment for their customers, working interactively with a pool of data of the entire product line, to create a dynamic digital catalogue assortment and order for a customer.

T: +44 (0)1460 279744 F: +44 (0)1460 271783 | info@aworkbook.com | www.aworkbook.com

“What aWorkbook allows us to to do is eliminate several bottlenecks and points of entry and provide a very user-friendly interface for the sales person in the field to write an order, submit the order to us, and simultaneously provide an order copy to the customer.” “aWorkbook helps the salespeople work with their customer on an assortment. It’s very speedy and efficient,100 per cent accurate too so we avoid any transcription errors.”

iPad’s running aWorkbook eases order entry in the field “We used to even get handwritten orders on cocktail napkins. I’m not exaggerating. Now salespeople can do the orders in the field or back in the office. And with aWorkbook’s API so friendly, we can automate the back end entry to our ERP.” “At the moment we have 7 sales representatives using aWorkbook in the Tori Richard Menswear division. We’ll be rolling it out all five divisions later this year covering 29 salespeople. We’ve rolled out iPads to the whole team.”

“We were one of the beta users of aWorkbook. We wanted to phase it in so the application would be embraced. The need and urgency was in the men’s division, we felt they would be best equipped and that’s where we had the most senior people.”

“It’s being used by our in-house employees and independent sales people, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. There’s a sense of relief about how user friendly it is. The sales people had heard about a sales entry tool and they had been gnashing their teeth, now they’re relieved.”

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“They’re using a range of platforms in the field and in the office, and aWorkbook has the same seamless interface, so the same actions are done the same way between the iPad and desktop applications for example.”

“For the sales people, speed is the most obvious benefit. Once we get the ERP intergration completed on our side, accuracy will be the huge improvement. Comparing a hand written order or a keyed in Excel file to a pre-filled out assortment with styles and colours - it’s a huge step forward. We’ll eliminate 100 per cent human error in the order entry.”

Easy implementation.

“Right now we have about 500 skus in the system, and in the next few weeks we’ll add the next season’s range, taking it to about 1000 skus.”

“We implemented the solution very swiftly, in just 8 weeks all told with just one person. Most of this time was for us to modify our workflow, collect style information and arrange our data for entry into the system. Once we had our data together in a consistent form, the implementation was a breeze.”

About aWorkbook aWorkbook is a cross platform software application used by brand owning manufacturing companies in the apparel and footwear sector to support product range planning, assortment selling, communicating brand stories and capturing orders.

The iPad version of aWorkbook was approved for distribution by the Apple App Store in September 2011.

About Hark aWorkbook has been developed over the last ten years by Hark Solutions Limited working with brands of all sizes in the apparel industry. The aWorkbook solution evolved from the Atomium digital workbook product to aWorkbook version 3.1 which is available now in the Apple app store and as an internet download. Hark have over ten years experience delivering digital communications solutions to companies selling branded goods in to the wholesale B2B channel. www.atomium.biz

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