www.kerridgecs.com
KCS and Luckins – delivering top quality data together
“High quality, accurate and consistent product data is key to driving critical business processes including sales, purchase order processing and e-commerce,” said Kevin Gutteridge, Technical Director at Luckins. “Any successful Electrical Distributor will understand that access to reliable up-to-date trade price data is essential to maintain profit margins.
However, acquiring, collating and managing this data is very labour intensive, requiring both data manipulation skills and an understanding of electrical products. Fortunately, electrical distributors can rely on Luckins data, a reliable single source with a proven track record, from an organisation with the capacity to take on more complex, bespoke data management projects if required.”
For over fifty years, Luckins (now part of Trimble MEP division) has been the de facto standard source of product and price data for electrical distributors. Today Luckins data is seen by many as an essential component of their ERP system.
More recently the company has introduced LUCKINSlive, a hub for more in-depth product information including pictures, technical data sheets, MSDS and catalogue pages which complement the core product descriptions and price data. This rich product data can be accessed either directly from LUCKINSlive or via API enabling it to populate an electrical distributor’s own web site. Luckins data includes manufacturers’ catalogue numbers, product descriptions and trade prices and is indexed by supplier, product range and commodity. It also includes the unique, industry-standard Luckins TSI Code, enabling unambiguous identification of each product in the database and a fool-proof method of transferring data between systems.
Luckins has worked with Kerridge Commercial Systems for many years but things have moved on since the days of flat file formats and data delivered on physical media. Bonus Electrical’s recent K8 upgrade, described earlier in this publication, provided the ideal opportunity and impetus to upgrade the K8/Luckins integration and the Luckins technical team worked closely with KCS to ensure a smooth implementation for Bonus. Kevin continued, “By working closely together, we ensured that KCS were fully aware of all facets of the Luckins data, their relevance to an electrical distributor’s business and how best to integrate them into the system. By using the TSI Code we were able to match data between the customer’s old and new systems that dramatically reduced the overall time required for testing and implementation. The investment in development and implementation time at this stage will set Bonus in good stead to benefit from the Luckins data for many years to come.”
Electrical distributors face many new challenges in today’s business world including on-line competition and ever more demanding customer expectations. Detailed sales analysis, efficient transfer of data between trading partners and a successful e-commerce strategy are now seen as essential to survival. All of these require effective exploitation of top quality product data – which fortunately is achievable through the Luckins-KCS integration.
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