MPW Australia and Commence

Around four years ago MPW Australia recognised the need for a distributed, shared approach to customer information, and looked at what was available in the market. After extensive evaluation, Commence was chosen and MPW has come to rely on Commence for accessing information on every aspect of day to day business with its customers.

MPW Australia has less than 20 people and deals with all the automotive manufactures in Australia, all the white goods manufacturers in Australia and most of the components suppliers to these industries. Their customers are demanding and they need the best tools to meet their requirements.

MPW Australia’s role has been, and still is to provide better solutions for manufacturers. The company’s objective is to manufacture and integrates it’s range of products into complete solutions to effectively meet it’s customers needs. Plastics welding, leak testing, robotics, motion systems and special purpose machines are the main areas of company activity. They also automate many of the solutions using 6 axis robots and custom built automation solutions. MPW is recognised as one of the  “Hi Tech” leaders in the industry.

Commence has allowed MPW to cater to its customers needs and still keep across their individual requirements.  “We can keep a journal entry of all interactions with our clients, whether it’s a phone call, note or quotation,” according to Dale Brown, MPW Australia Managing Director. “Plus Commence automatically reminds us when we need to follow up with a customer or check back on the progress on a prospective opportunity.”

“Commence is unique in its ability to model the complex relationships in our business. The ability to make connections between and within data categories means that we link the individual customer with every quotation, project, in-house purchase order and invoice.  Commence allows us to deliver the highest level of customer service to ensure we do not let our customer down.”

“From a management perspective, we have instant access to all aspects of the business; which can then be presented using the flexible reporting tools. Commence  allows the performance of the business to be seen at the touch of a button. With a few minor manual entries from our accounting package the profitability of every customer order can be reviewed easily.“

Commence has been customised extensively to meet the requirements of the MPW business workflow and procedures. For example, prices are imported from suppliers, in a variety of currencies, and the Australian price is automatically generated. A change in the exchange rate is handled easily, with Commence' built in calculation tools.  “Commence’s ability to be moulded to meet our needs are the best I have seen. All our reporting and interface have been built in house with relatively little effort  (we do not have IT people on site). Commence is also reliable and easy to install. “, said Mr Brown.

“The comments that I have had from the staff tell me that Commence is the best tool I have put in place to allow them to perform at the level I and our customers expect.”

MPW has also made extensive use of the interfaces to other products and applications provided by Commence. Commence has been integrated with Exchange to act as an address book, and also to the PalmPilot. The built in remote access synchronisation means that key staff can still have full use of the database while working remotely.

As new versions of Commence have been released, MPW has upgraded to take advantage of the new features. They are planning to upgrade to Commence 2.1 in the near future, to take their customer service to the next level.