Office Choice is a Buying Group for independent stationers and office supplies businesses, based out of Melbourne, Australia. They have over 130 members nationwide who are supported with Merchandise, Marketing, IT and Operational support.

They wanted to implement a rebate management system to drive greater efficiency, effective reporting and more transparency with their suppliers and members. Here is the story of why Enable ticked all those boxes for them and more.  

Old and Archaic Systems not Fit for the Job

Jamie Keyzer, Former COO at Office Choice, has been in the position for six years and works very closely with the CEO and the board around the financials of the business. Keyzer also heads up their Operations and IT teams. He explains that in the past, their deals were managed by two people spread across multiple departments using old and archaic systems and spreadsheets.

Keyzer explains, “I think we’ve had a lack of efficiency surrounding the amount of time involved and the amount of human interaction with the data. Instead of relying on the systems and the computer systems to manage them and the software, it's really relying on human intervention, which can create unnecessary errors and leakage of information and data.”

From Server Room to the Cloud

No one in the business really understood their current solution, which was old and outdated. They were relying on a gut feeling to make sure that they got any changes and updates that they needed done. Keyzer says, “It was the only system that we had left in the business that was still sitting on a physical server in our office and it's something that we can't move to the cloud. It was critically important for us to be able to find a cloud-based solution.”

Experience with the Enable Team has been First Class

Four months into their Enable journey, Keyzer praises the Enable team, “The biggest thing for me has been the level of engagement with the team, whether that be from the start, when I first did my initial inquiry form online, right through to where we are today. The onboarding process has been amazing. The engagement and rapport building from the team has been fantastic.”

When referring to onboarding with Enable, Keyzer explains, “Kaiden and the team have done a great job to date. They've been highly engaging, continue to communicate with us and always make sure they understand our business and what our business needs are. They're always looking at ideas to meet complexities head on and find us a really sound solution, which they've been able to achieve to date.”

Keyzer continues, “We are excited to be a part of the Enable family and the experience has been first class from the very first enquiry through to development, implementation and go live.”

Driving Efficiencies, Collaboration and High-Quality Reporting

For Office Choice, collaborating and being more open with their suppliers and members has been a big challenge for them. “Historically in our business, we’ve struggled to maintain transparent with those who we pay our rebates to and what they're achieving. This platform is now going to give us all of that while also providing access to members and allowing them to track how they're performing, which is going to be important”.

Another pain point for Office Choice was the way their system delivered reports and their lack of quality reporting. Reporting is extremely critical for their business. As Keyzer says, “With Enable we hope to drive efficiencies in our business and try to give those hours back to spend on other areas of the business to drive it forward”

Bringing Finance and Merchandising into Alignment

For Office Choice, the real focus was around engagement with their external stakeholders - their members and suppliers. But one of the things that wasn't high on their agenda was the collaboration that was going to be driven between finance who pay the rebates, collect the supply data. And their merchandise team who deal with the trading terms with suppliers and negotiate the rebates.

“Enable has really bought those two departments closer together to really work together and make sure that all the data is correct and all the information that's in the system is correct. It supports those guys as well through the collaboration tool, where now all of our trading terms live on the Enable platform and get signed off on the Enable platform. Whereas previously, it was emails backwards, print, sign, all those fun things. So, that's certainly brought our merchandise and finance teams closer together.”

Why Should Others Consider Enable?

Keyzer says, “I think obviously you need to find the solution that suits you. Enable absolutely suits us as a business. And I think it's thinking about what the end goal is, and what's critically important for your business, depending on the type of business that you have.”