Go Electrical, one of Australia’s fastest growing electrical wholesalers, has selected business software specialist, Markinson, to upgrade the company’s legacy enterprise application platform and deploy a new customised ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution to support its growing national network of wholesale outlets.

The winning solution, MomentumPro – a specialised enterprise management software for the wholesale distribution sector – also incorporates Markinson’s Enterprise Mobility and WebOnline products, to provide Go Electrical’s mobile field sales team with ‘anytime, anywhere’ access to enterprise applications and a pre-built business-to-customer eBusiness solution.

Embracing current technology trends and deploying in a fully hosted environment, the new platform also delivers improved reporting and analysis capabilities through business intelligence and improved partner and supplier collaboration with the addition of business process management to automate business processes.

Go Electrical chief executive officer Chris Brookhouse says the new platform would equip the company to better manage its expansion.

“First of all, we wanted a solution which allows us to service our customers better,” he says.

“We were impressed with the ability to introduce mobile solutions to our workforce. Every mobile field sales rep will have real time access to our business systems, which makes it easier for them to make faster decisions and provide better service to our customers.

“We view MomentumPro as giving us a future proof platform and will allow us to easily introduce new applications in the future.”

With aggressive growth plans in place for 2012/13, to claim greater market share in the electrical wholesale market, Go Electrical’s existing business system was at capacity and nearing end of life from a maintenance and support perspective, prompting Go Electrical to seek a fresh approach with a complete overhaul of the company’s legacy systems.

“The new solution had to support ecommerce trading with our contractors and also deliver a number of features specific to our industry, as well as support electronic data interchange with our suppliers and provide the capability to run our Points2Go reward program for electrical contractors.

“After an extensive review of software vendors Markinson was the only provider that truly demonstrated a deep understanding of our industry and went the extra mile to deliver a comprehensive solution and minimise risk and disruption during changeover,” Chris explains.

Commenting on the deal, Markinson chief executive Ian Whiting says the company’s established and best in class position in the electrical wholesale sector and other similar specialised markets and comprehensive product portfolio, has allowed Markinson to win work away from many generic IT providers looking to carve a position in the electrical wholesale sector.

“As a business we have seen strong demand in the distribution, wholesale and retail management sectors for our suite of business solutions and we will continue to aggressively build upon our position in niche markets both here and in the Asia-Pacific, to strengthen our position as a leading provider of specialist business solutions to SMBs,” he says.