Manchester—Based Opal Telecom Standardises Entire Sales Operations on NetSuite; 1,000-User Implementation Simplifies Order Management, Drives Sales
LONDON—June 23, 2005—NetSuite, Inc., the market leader in on-demand business solutions for growing businesses, today announced its largest customer win to-date. Opal Telecom, one of the UK's largest telecom network operators and a wholly owned subsidiary of The Carphone Warehouse Group, has signed up for one thousand NetSuite user seats. Opal Telecom's decision of standardizing on NetSuite is based on key factors including NetSuite CRM+ functionality that offers order management and partner relationship management. Additionally, advanced customisation technology via NetFlex will help tie the front-office to back-office functionality so that they can dramatically reduce the time and hassle to generate sales orders, enhance partner communications, and ultimately gain more customers and increase sales for the company. For more information about the story, please go to www.netsuite.com.sg/opal.
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. While implementing NetSuite in a phased approach, Opal Telecom is already utilising many of NetSuite's newly-announced CRM+ features, including order management, partner relationship management and expense reporting.
"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."
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."
With NetSuite's UK Professional Services working together with Opal Telecom's IT department, Opal has been able to customise NetSuite using Java script and other tools apart of the NetSuite NetFlex platform (www.netsuite.com.sg/netflex). 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.
"Our Professional Services team has helped Opal Telecom take NetSuite 'out of the box' and use its flexibility to transform the product to fit into Opal's specific business model—and do all this a reasonable cost," said Dean Mansfield, Vice President of International Markets for NetSuite. "What NetSuite and Opal Telecom are doing together is a clear indication that decaying client/server software is not working for businesses that want to operate at low cost while focusing on their core competencies. NetSuite provides one solution that can take away the pains associated with traditional software systems."
About Opal Telecom
Opal is one of the UK's largest telecoms network operators and is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Carphone Warehouse Group plc (a UK FTSE 250 company). Opal's strategy is for the group to lease transmission capacity and focus capital investment on the development of bespoke intelligent network solutions. The business has developed its own intelligent network (IN), interactive voice response (IVR) and internet service provider outsourcing (ISPO) platforms. Against a background of deregulation in the market for telecoms services, Opal has been successful in winning new business and growing customer revenue steams rapidly.
Through a multi-million pound investment in technology, Opal Telecom is a major player in the delivery of business focused telecom solutions that are at the forefront of the new communications era. For more information visit www.opaltelecom.com.