Westmorland Laundry is a multi-million-pound laundry facility and depot network providing hotels, guest houses, serviced apartments, and restaurants throughout the Lake District, Yorkshire Dales, and the North West with superior quality linen, towels, and high-quality laundry on a daily basis.
Westmorland Laundry provides their client with the full service, from picking up used laundry, managing the cleaning process and returning the right laundry to the right establishment. This process involves careful management of stock to ensure each client has all the clean laundry they need, and also the billing process needs to work hand in hand with this washing cycle to ensure that the correct items are charged for.
Prior to working with OpenCRM, managing director Alex Mauro described their process “clunky”.
“Customers manually populating advice notes, us collating them and transferring to accounts who in turn would populate consolidated figures onto an excel spreadsheet. This would then be used to raise the invoices. VERY time consuming and costly!”
They needed a better way.
Their Open CRM Solution
The team at OpenCRM worked closely with Alex and his team to develop a solution that would give to Westmorland Laundry all the tools they needed to meet their requirements.
This involved the planning and delivery of significant amount of bespoke development work as well as the customisation of existing functionality, especially of our customer portal.
“OpenCRM developed elements of existing modules so that the raw data is now input by the customer via the online portal. This information is seamlessly pushed into OpenCRM for checking by the depot staff and used to generate delivery notes, and invoices.”
This work involved extending the current capabilities of the existing customer portal to enable Westmorland’s clients to easily submit laundry requests (Advice Notes), view the progress of their existing laundry “in cycle”, and to also review past invoices.
Submitted requests can therefore be seamlessly raised as Sales Orders in OpenCRM, notifying the relevant people that at order is ready for collection and processing.
In addition, we designed a bespoke “reconciliation” screen which allows the depot staff to check and complete the order without needing to edit the order itself. They also have the ability to add any items that the client has forgotten and adjust any items counted incorrectly, to ensure that the delivery of fresh laundry and invoicing is always accurate.
OpenCRM has also carried out some development work around the processing of Sales Orders and creation of Invoices. All done with the goal of streamlining the processes and making the team more efficient.
Once the system was ready to go, OpenCRM delivered on-site training with both the office and depot staff members at Westmorland Laundry, delivering this alongside a bespoke user-guide for both staff and for clients, to ensure everyone knows how to manage their part of the system.
Although this was a steep learning curve for both staff members as well as clients, the adoption of the new system was a real success. As Alex himself puts it, ”the biggest compliment I can give is that the system is rarely mentioned – neither by customers nor my staff. That tells me that it is working very well!“.
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