Kerridge Commercial Systems, and K8, partners with TSI Luckins

Kerridge Commercial Systems, leading software provider to the electrical wholesaler and distributor market place, recently signed a software partner agreement with TSI Luckins.

(May 2005) Kerridge Commercial Systems and its software solution, K8, have become new Luckins Software Partners. TSI Luckins is the UK's leading specialist in product and pricing data services and related software applications for the Electrical, HVAC and Tools sectors. The TSI Code – our unique identifier for each product in the industry – has become the de facto standard product code for e-Business applications.

According to Ian Bendelow, Business Development Director, Kerridge Commercial Systems, "as a further commitment to the electrical wholesaler and distributor marketplace, we are tremendously pleased to announce the development of a standard interface to Luckins with our K8 software solution."

"The interface between K8 and Luckins further strengthens the position of our market leading software solution, K8. This tight integration between K8 and Luckins delivers a multitude of benefits. The main benefit of this is at the Trade Counter, where Luckins data can be seamlessly accessed directly from the K8 point of sale screens during a sales enquiry, thus offering a faster and better level of service to customers."

Electrical Wholesalers and Distributors can now seamlessly be kept updated with supplier product information and price data. The data is fed through the Kerridge Commercial Systems' interface with the Luckins database, and any updates can be performed instantly.

As part of the Kerridge Commercial Systems' K8 solution, integration with manufacturers, suppliers and bureaus catalogues / price lists is provided. One of these key integration layers is that with the on-line Luckins system. Through this integration, wholesalers and distributors can selectively 'download' product data from the Luckins system and automatically update their K8 price, product and stock files with data such as:

· Item catalogue number
· Choice of short or expanded description
· Trade, split pack and bulk prices
· Price effective dates
· Regulators
· Manufacturer, commodity and product range indexes.

Extended Functionality

The several layers of product, pricing and stocking details provided by K8 can be automatically updated from Luckins. Normally, wholesalers and distributors have limited data maintenance resource and therefore only hold the details of the products that they normally stock on file. With K8 and Luckins integration, many thousands of products can be held on file and called upon at the point of sale for exceptional / special purchase and sales. This helps to ensure that all manufacturer and supplier data is accurately available at the point of contact with the customers. The availability of product codes, descriptions, prices etc. at the point of sales helps to reduce the number of human errors, increase customer service and provide better and more reliable management information.

Users can choose to update product data automatically or make use of checkpoints to validate data. This can be carried out either on demand or automatically as part of a 'batch' process.

Benefits

The K8 integration with Luckins makes product maintenance easy, accurate and efficient. Other benefits include:

· High speed product data updates
· Updates on demand
· Timeliness of data updates
· Precision of product data
· Little or no manual keying of data
· Reduction in data maintenance costs
· Flexible price list mechanism
· Access to full supplier catalogues / price lists.

Continues Ian Bendelow, "our K8 users will be able to access over 700,000 items from over 1,100 suppliers (all currently on available from Luckins Data Services) from within the enquiry and sales order processing screens. Our philosophy is always to be one step ahead and always in a position to offer the best possible solution to our customers."

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