Company Profile
Wisepress Ltd. is a leading conference bookseller and publication display company specialising in medical and scientific books and journals. Established 25 years ago they serve publishers and individual customers throughout Europe. Logistics are key to their core operation - Wisepress attends 250 conferences a year, distributes half a million books and has accounts with over 2,000 suppliers worldwide.
The Challenge
With the departure of their IT Director in 2005, Wisepress suddenly saw themselves faced with the challenges of maintaining their mission critical system - a master database of books (180,000 plus) that handles several other key areas of the business, including all company accounts, customer orders and management of events. Weekly imports from the latest BookData (worldwide bibliographic data) and its integration placed further demands on the system.
When a number of problems started causing disruption to their business activities, Wisepress commissioned Sapphire to help.
The Solution
Application maintenance & development
Roger Chinn, one of Sapphire's senior consultants, provided immediate assistance and performed a thorough analysis of the system. This resulted in a detailed report identifying the key problem areas such as a large number of redundant items and non-working sections.
Wisepress then outsourced the maintenance and fixing of the system to Sapphire. Rather than have all the system's issues addressed at once, Wisepress opted for an on-going contract aimed at tackling them on a priority basis. Over the last 18 months Sapphire have been providing day-to-day maintenance, correcting problems, making enhancements to the system and designing an interface to the new website.
E-commerce website development
Parallel to this Wisepress was also having problems with their website hosting company. Minor textual changes were taking a long time to be implemented and communication was poor. This along with their wish to introduce a number of new features to the site and improve the existing design prompted Wisepress to look for a better service.
Having heard of our facilities and pleased with the level of service received, Wisepress then contracted Sapphire to develop a new version of their website. Their requirements included:
- Implementation of a new design
- Implementation of an e-commerce site with comprehensive search facilities
- Implementation of a customer's registration area
- Integration with their existing database system
- Implementation of a comprehensive Administration site providing statistics and information about customer's details and purchasing history
- Deployment of a customised Content Management System.
After refining the original project specification Wisepress gave the go ahead for development. During implementation several new areas were added and the scope modified to produce an impressive and comprehensive e-commerce website.
The Outcome
Contracting Sapphire to sort out their mission critical system has meant a dramatic reduction and elimination of the day-to-day problems Wisepress faced. The system has been optimised and the user interface improved. The changes have lead to an overall increase in productivity and cost reduction.
Now live for over 6 months, Wisepress's new website is a true CRM system providing an incredible level of information about their customers. The implementation of a bespoke content management section means that Wisepress is in full control of their site, enabling them to modify the content of text, pictures and links in a WYSISWYG fashion. Furthermore the administration section enables them to apply promotional discounts to the whole range or a selection of books, pick and display a book (between 180,000!) to be the Book of the Month, modify details of their events on the fly in between others.
Recently Wisepress have adopted our Internet Marketing services to further enhance the effectiveness of their brand and promote lead generation.
