RS Components First To Market With Free e-Procurement


20/02/2002

RS Breaks The Rules Of Expensive e-Procurement By Developing A Free Application To Strengthen Its Customer Relationships

20th February 2002: Electrocomponents plc (LSE:ECM) today unveils a strategic first - a new service to improve purchasing efficiency and control whilst delivering immediate cost savings for customers of its Internet Trading Channel -- rswww.com.

PurchasingManager™

Trademarked RS PurchasingManager™, the free service provides an application which is easily configured to meet the needs of the purchasing professional at each of RS' customer organisations. PurchasingManagerä allows an unlimited number of people inside an organisation to be empowered to place orders as and when they need things, thus freeing up purchasing's time to do other more valuable tasks. But importantly for people whose job it is to control expenditure and report on cost centres, PurchasingManager™ will ask for authorisation if individual or departmental spending levels are exceeded, as well as provide company-wide reports for analysis and even prevent people changing delivery addresses. In short, it provides the benefits of an e-procurement package without the cost.

"We developed this application ourselves on the back of a year's consultation with our clients because we found that existing purchasing software couldn't be adapted easily to mirror the way people like to work. We simplified the workflow and approval process to make it relevant to ordering low value items. Small things like changing the language used to reflect a company's existing internal vocabulary have proved culturally invaluable in getting people to accept a new way of purchasing online," said Rob Fifield, Ecommerce Project Manager.

Summary of PurchasingManager™ Benefits:

  • It gives Purchasing departments the controls to allow end users to place their own orders
  • Provides total visibility for online transactions
  • Dramatically reduces paperwork through online ordering
  • Reduces invoice matching through a consolidated monthly summary (UK only at present)
  • Improves accuracy by automatically highlighting errors and allowing customers to personalise the terminology themselves to mirror their own internal descriptions
  • Intuitive for end-users to ensure they will adopt the system

In summary, it provides Controls, Workflow and Reports.

PurchasingManager™ is a stand alone e-procurement package, hosted by RS for the sale of RS products. It provides the majority of e-procurement benefits without the need to be integrated into a company's existing computer system.

Rewriting the Rules

In developing its own software, RS has rewritten the rules whereby only large companies could afford to invest millions of pounds buying and integrating largely unproven e-procurement packages. Instead of the long planning and implementation cycle attributed to the introduction of e-procurement, PurchasingManagerä takes only minutes to start using and returning benefits. The most tangible of these is limiting off-contract spending and reducing errors, as well as streamlining the process to cut out paperwork, originally viewed as the major benefit of an e-procurement package but proving harder to quantify in practice. Because PurchasingManagerä is free, any size of company can use it to prove the benefits of online purchasing, and in the current economic climate it's a logical first step.

Customers can create a culture of e-commerce and discover the benefits and obstacles their own organisation presents in a move to e-procurement before embarking on the complex business of specifying a system to a supplier. PurchasingManagerä is as simple or as complex as it needs to be to suit any size of organisation with logical layering of reporting at the organisational, departmental and individual level.

e-Commerce Adoption

"We expect to build strong strategic partnerships with our customers thanks to this initiative" said Ian Mason, Chief Executive of Electrocomponents plc, adding, "Customers learn with us and if they later move to a full blown e-procurement package, they will stay with RS using our advanced 'punch-out' capability which still gives them access to all of the functionality on the Internet Trading Channel without forgoing any of the purchasing controls."

RS has over 300,000 product entries for maintenance, operations and repair products (MRO) across 10 countries in Europe in 7 languages through its network of Internet Trading Channels. PurchasingManager™ is a web-based application which means it is available across Europe simultaneously, hosted by RS but with confidential information specific to each customer once they have logged in.

Customer reaction to the pilot stage has been enthusiastic with pilots completed successfully in the UK, France, Germany and Italy.

Please visit the link below if you would like to take a tour of PurchasingManager™:

http://rswww.com/PurchasingManagerTour

About Electrocomponents

Electrocomponents plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange in the Support Services sector and is a FTSE100 constituent. It is the leading high service industrial components distributor in the world supplying circa 1.5 million customers with 300,000 products from 3000 suppliers. Electrocomponents' growth has been organic with the strategic thrust of the last decade being to roll out the RS business model internationally. In July 1999, an electronics components distributor, (Allied), was acquired in the United States to make the group the only truly global high service distributor.

RS PurchasingManager™ is a trademark of Electrocomponents plc. Patent pending.

For further information please contact Gnash Communications:
Narda Shirley or Elsa Weill
narda@gnash.co.uk, elsa@gnash.co.uk
Mobile: 07770 888318
Office: 0207 313 4770