Introduction

When GeoHay was founded they had a simple effective idea, one manufacturing process and a sales team of one. They experienced rapid growth and now sell an entire catalog of water management, erosion and sediment control products made from recyclable materials to construction and industrial customers including government agencies. They were using simple accounting software to conduct billing and were handling leads and purchase orders via a series of excel spreadsheets that were constantly being emailed around.

Challenges

After taking a poll from the team GeoHay made a list of all the software they thought they needed including a CRM, order processing and a system to manage government regulations and approvals. The price tag for software to handle all three aspects was daunting and none of the options they found would integrate with each other, making GeoHay unsure if the added effort involved to transfer data from one system to the next would actually save them any time.

Solution

The migration to iBE.net was very quick, with GeoHay taking full advantage of the latest iBE.net functionality as it is released, customized for their particular needs. “People were really able to understand the benefits of the solution from the beginning”, says Mike Morrow of the sales team. “Through the system we are able to function as a team despite never being in the same room with each other, and we can quickly calculate how much it costs to land each new customer. Most importantly, the process is very transparent”. Government approvals can be managed through iBE.net’s project management application, with application documents attached to the project as files so they are never misplaced. Now approvals are managed by a team, instead of the burden falling solely on one person.

Benefits

“When we first migrated to iBE.net, we reduced our costs by 30 percent because we were better able to co-ordinate our production and shipping efforts and didn’t need to keep renting additional warehouse space” says Ray Mewshaw, GeoHay’s production manager. iBE.net’s team also designed a custom CRM solution to allow GeoHay to standardize the lead qualification process, and iBE.net’s collaboration tools increased team communication so much that the sales manager has gone back into the field to expand their efforts to enter a new market.