Recently, Frank Greer, CEO of Zipit Wireless, reached out to the Kopis team for help creating a new Order Management system to better meet their needs.

They needed to:

• Develop back-end reporting to see into multiple software systems as once
• Reduce the time it takes to produce reports

Zipit Wireless was using Quickbooks and Salesforce for accounting and sales and then using Excel for their order entry and reporting system. None of these tools were a good fit for their backend reporting, especially as they had no way to easily measure important metrics like customer churn.

“Retention is a big deal in our industry,” said Frank. “And I had no way to easily see how customers were engaging with our Critical Messaging Solutions from week-to-week.”

Another issue with the system that Zipit was using was the time that it took to create monthly reports.

“I was doing the reports myself,” said Frank. “Partly because I didn’t want to take my development team away from doing what they do best, and I didn’t want to train anyone on our complicated system, and partly because I need to have a good overview of the business. But running these reports took me two or three days, and I found myself really dreading it every month.”

Kopis partnered with Frank and his team to develop a backend reporting system and a front-end order entry system that would be easy for anyone to use from anywhere.

We wanted to help Zipit Wireless develop one system that would do everything they needed it to do and nothing more. A simple, reliable order entry and more efficient reporting were the only needs they had. In this case, an existing product would have required them to change their process to match the product, rather than the other way around.

“Even though Zipit is a technology company and this is something we technically could do internally, I felt like it was important to get an outside perspective and to really dig into what we needed—the stuff we might not think of ourselves because we’re too close to it,” Frank said. “I’ve worked with Andy and his team at Kopis before when I needed a backend solution, and I know they’re good partners. They’re a solid team, they know the software, and they are great at communicating with their clients and making sure they understand their needs.”

Zipit Wireless also didn’t want to tackle the problem internally because they didn’t want to take their development team’s focus away from creating and launching new products and solving problems for their service partners. They felt their resources were already consumed with the business of doing their business.

“Anytime my team has to deal with an internal software problem, customer service suffers, productivity suffers, and that’s not a good thing,” said Frank.

After figuring out how Zipit employees work and which reporting metrics are the most important to the company, Kopis developed one system that included both a better front-end order entry system and a better backend reporting tool.

The front-end order entry system is web-based, well-defined, and minimizes errors. The backend reporting system is more robust, including multiple capabilities that Zipit didn’t have before.

“I was very impressed,” Frank said. “Now I can see sales, growth, retention, customer churn, financials, commissions. All in one place. And the order entry system is great, too. It walks employees through the ordering process and has helped clear up a lot of errors and data nuisances.”

However, the biggest benefit, by far, has been the time savings.