As a £multi-million IT reseller, Probrand employs 150 people and sits at the epicenter of the IT market with offices in Birmingham, Manchester and Calcutta. It offers everything from a printer toner cartridge to IBM Blade servers alongside proactive IT service and support.

As part of a strategic move, Probrand engaged with business solutions provider Mercato to deliver maximum competitive advantage.

Probrand's business meant manually managing and evaluating the multiple distribution channels used by IT vendors and manufacturers for their product range. This equates to many suppliers and manufacturers and over 500,000 line items.

Traditionally buyers consume 30+ minutes phoning a number of suppliers to find where the required product is available at what they perceive to be the cheapest price – rarely was this the case.

The sales team on the other hand managed customers and their needs, disputes and returns. Meanwhile other departments such as finance and warehouse carried out their core roles independently.

Scaled up across the entire business, a lack of sharing information or data in a collaborative fashion was hampering business growth with time wastage, duplication of effort, high cost of transaction and ultimately poor value for customers.

"Our biggest challenge has been to increase turnover and profitability without increasing staff overheads by the same level," said Chris Griesbach, Probrand Commercial Director.

Mercato's principle objective is to enable organisations to use the power of shared data for maximum business advantage.

Then its mission is to unlock the value that lies within through application of intuitive web-based tools that provide more efficient ways of buying, selling, managing, analysing and interacting within any volatile supplychain. It is Mercato's capability to connect each function seamlessly that makes it unique.

Mercato's approach takes an enterprise collaboration view of an organisation and integrates the functionality of the various business operations, mapping structured workflows onto business architecture with a robust real-time database system as a foundation.

1. Data rationalisation - Stage One sees Mercato technology bring sense, order and structure to otherwise chaotic, real-time supply chain data streams. This means applying scaleable technology that 'real-time' manages and correlates all incoming and outgoing data streams across all relationships into one central auditable data backbone.

2. Business benefit driven tools – Stage Two focuses on the deployment of an intuitive e-procurement function that offers a series of additional tried and tested software tools that match business teams with functionality and objectives. The Mercato team then looks to add even greater value by developing bespoke tools with specialist functionality to ream further value from the organisation's data eg. SCA and Acumen for Probrand.

Chris Griesbach, Commercial Director at Probrand, said: "As a direct result of the Mercato enterprise collaboration technology that has been introduced to lean and maximise our business, sales have grown organically by over 380% from £14.9m in 2005 to £57.6m in 2009.

"The best practice and best value systems and processes it has provided have won the business industry awards, a CIPS accreditation for procurement excellence and perhaps the largest government framework of its type.

"We were so impressed with our own benefits driven by the solution we briefed Mercato to work with us to re-develop our central eprocurement system into something for us to offer B2B customers.

"This opened up new sales opportunities for us with the launch of www.theITIndex.co.uk, which daily updates over 125,000 products with best price and stock information from over 1,200 suppliers. This has driven our business forward as the future of reselling IT.

"We have reduced duplication of effort right across the business. For example, whilst our sales have grown the number of buyers we employ has remained the same as the solution has optimised their role. The team no longer wastes time calling multiple suppliers for manual stock and price comparisons. They get through more in less time, which has enabled diversification of role to cover other areas. We are getting more from the same overhead with greater focus.

"Our staff have been optimised and this has buoyed job satisfaction. Their roles have been supported like never before and this has improved staff retention and yield-per-head. In 2005 for every pound paid to staff we returned £15.24 in revenue. By 2009 this had more than doubled.

"The sales force is leaner and fitter, tripling sales per head within four years to top over three times the £250K average for our industry in 2009. This has been at the heart of our year-on-year growth amidst a traditionally flat IT sector and a testing economy.

"With fully automated web technology giving the sales team the supply chain and customer information and orders they demand, it is saving at least a working week in man hours per head. Suppliers are getting orders without having to spend time on the phone negotiating with us. It has eradicated calls to multiple suppliers for price, stock, RFQs or product specifications and is adding value to the bottom line.

"The optimised sales team manages customers better and closes deals faster with less administration. We have leaned the entire buy-sell process of our business and this has strengthened supplier partnerships.

"Purchase-to-delivery times have reduced from 3 days to 1.67. We are getting people to the best priced products in the shortest possible time. The solution's 'every-angle' audit trail has also reduced our returns on shipments from 5% to 1.8%, improving relationships with suppliers and customers further. Supplier disputes have shortened and declined to just 0.1% in stark contrast to the industry standard of 5 – 10%.

"Disputes with customers have also declined to 0.7%, which means fewer customers are placed on hold and a greater opportunity to do more business. In itself, this has improved cashflow.

"Having reduced administration and cost within the supply chain thanks to an automated electronic ethos, we achieve payment from customers nearly twice as fast as the competition. This keeps us cash flow positive.

"In turn, we cement supplier relationships even more by paying them 35% faster than the market average and we get better deals and improved credit limits as the suppliers true cost of sale is less.

"Our unquestionable quick auditability has helped us strengthen relationships with all of the financial institutions we deal with."

"The efficiencies provided by the end-to-end solution have reduced our stock holding down to just 1 day. We are barely holding onto stock and this improves cashflow further. The system is helping us move stock quicker, we now use a smaller warehouse which demands less management.

Steve Bushell, Director of Marketing, Probrand, said: "As the business has grown, especially through our online offering, relationships with vendors have strengthened by improving communications and uniquely enabling them a direct marketing channel to end users. This has helped them tailor and maximise sell through to end users without product communication getting lost in translation. We have grown our business for them and with them. One vendor grew sales 300%.

"Mercato has empowered Probrand to lead the market by sewing together and shortening the supply chain. It has given us the ability to add the 'Value Add' in VAR."