Built For
Orient Express Racing
Orient Express Racing’s operations are high performance — their parts, their service & their inventory management with Acctivate
Orient Express Racing is owned and operated by motorsports enthusiasts, racers and engineers. They provide high-performance motorcycle parts to dealers, race teams and retail customers and offer a full range of motor building, modification services, machine work and fabrication.
“We have always been proud of the fact that we are still small enough, but large enough to have direct contact with our customers, either by phone, email or by fax,” said Jennifer Dowling, Network administrator, Orient Express Racing. “When they call, they know that a live person will answer the phone.”
Dowling continued to explain how they offer superior customer service.
“For years our customers have known that they can buy those hard-to-find products. By the same token when something new comes out, we are very proactive in sourcing those products.”
The need for a high performance inventory management software
Orient Express Racing used an outdated DOS-based system prior to Acctivate. Dowling described that experience…
The old system was on its last legs and our accountant said to us, ‘I need you to find something where I can get you to use QuickBooks.’
We were still using manual accounting and we were outgrowing it.”
They began the search for an inventory management software compatible with QuickBooks.
I had to find something that could swallow all of our 13,000+ part numbers and our 7,000 customer files.
QuickBooks was only able to handle our accounting, not our inventory. We needed something that would be able to manage our large inventory and still be able to talk to QuickBooks.”
Dowling found Acctivate after nine months of research. She spoke about the implementation process and transition to Acctivate.
All the training and hand-holding that I had before we went live made the whole transition that much easier. I needed to do the bulk of that work by myself while everyone else was still in the old system.
I was very pleasantly surprised that I was able to do all of the upfront work to get us to transition to the new system. I told everyone that I was flipping the switch and they would have to start using Acctivate the next day. It was seamless.
It was such a great transition to Acctivate. I have felt comfortable from the first day.”
eCommerce
As we continue to grow and as Acctivate continues to grow along with us, it is helping us to transition to a better eCommerce experience for our customers.
Acctivate has created some fantastic tools for syncing with our eCommerce site. We are very excited about that for both our dealers as well as our retail customers. It affords us so many ways to service both segments of the market.”
Customer Management
One way Orient Express Racing keeps their customers aware of the latest and greatest products is via their eMail newsletter. Dowling explains how Acctivate helps them with this.
Without Acctivate’s Customer Management tools, I wouldn’t be able to have a good way of doing queries on the type of customer that we want to send the newsletter. Acctivate makes it just so much easier.”
Acctivate’s custom fields enable Orient Express Racing to know specifics about a customer, for example…
When I’m in Acctivate’s Configuration Manager, I can put in different fields. Maybe a salesperson wants to know that a certain customer always wants cruiser bikes. They can put in that type of information and we can track that later.
If the salesperson asks me, ‘Can you do a query on all the customers that have a cruiser?’ I can do that for them because they’ve been keeping that information in the database.”
Orient Express uses Acctivate’s Business Activity Management feature to deliver superior customer service.
We’re taking full advantage of Acctivate’s business activities in terms of managing our RMAs and customer issues. We’ve become much more efficient than we were before.”
Decision Support tools
Various Orient Express Racing employees use Acctivate’s Dashboard each day to get a quick visual look into information they need to know.
The owner uses the dashboard to track daily what is going on. He sees products that are being sold, what product lines are ‘of the moment’ and which ones are not getting as much attention as they should.
The dashboard is thoroughly customizable. I’m sure that if I were to take half an hour with somebody, they could find ways it could be helpful to them.”
Dowling uses Acctivate’s Reporting tools powered by Crystal Reports® to create reports for various aspects of their business. She talked about ease of use in modifying and creating reports…
When I need to modify reports it is a piece of cake. When we first transitioned into Acctivate, I had a blast creating all the different reports, customizing them and putting our logo on them.
If anybody had anything they wanted changed to a report, I could do it instantly. It would be done ten minutes after they asked for it.”
Advanced Purchasing
Orient Express does direct fulfillment to customers. They use Acctivate’s Drop Ship feature almost everyday and it streamlines the process for them.
There’s some things that we are not actually taking stock of and putting in our warehouse. But there might be something that somebody is ordering from us consistently on a weekly basis. We’ve worked out with the manufacturer that instead of sending it straight to us, they send that to our customer. ” said Dowling.
“We know that the customers like the direct fulfillment because they get something quicker. That is always a concern if somebody is on a race team and they have to leave for a race. If it has to come to us first, they may lose time in transit. So they want it sent straight to them before they pack up their rig and they’re out the door.”
All business aspects = high performance
Orient Express’ high performance parts and services are now managed efficiently with a high performance inventory management software.
I have been very happy that I made the choice to implement Acctivate after I did all that research. We’re light years ahead of what we were before.”
Dowling spoke about Acctivate support and the help they received when they had to move to a new server…
Your company has always come forward and helped me whenever I needed it.
The Acctivate tech crew helped me to make the transition of moving the entire database onto a new server and getting us up and running again, which was fantastic.”
Call us at 817-870-1311