London, UK, 15th September 2008 - Phocas, a global leader in simple, accessible business intelligence (BI) (www.phocas.biz) today announces two new wins in the automotive market despite the current credit crunch affecting the country.

Phocas’ business intelligence software has been chosen by BPW Ltd, Europe’s leading axle and suspension manufacturer and Millers Oils, the leading lubricant manufacturer to the automotive, commercial vehicle and industrial sectors. 

By implementing PHOCAS these two companies can now, essentially, empower all employees throughout their organizations to make better decisions – helping them to quickly understand how they are performing; providing insight and clarity on how to improve business profitability and performance. Such powerful tools are a prerequisite to conquer today’s turbulent environment where there is an imperative need to understand the impact that sales have on the overall profitability and growth of the business, in real-time. These recent new wins demonstrate that despite the downturn businesses are turning to business intelligence to harvest the full potential from current customers. 

Senior Directors at BPW Ltd and Millers Oils can now apply this simple, out-of-the-box solution for rapid deployment and immediate ROI. Armed with in-depth knowledge; their teams are instantly alerted to not just the customer buying trend, but importantly what they are not buying, which they possibly should be. By alerting to missed opportunities and threats; sales, marketing and purchasing teams can ensure that the basket share of the customer and the market share of the company is profitably increased.

With PHOCAS, the ability to identify additional opportunities and monitor trends enables:
•   Sales teams to act more quickly to increase profitable sales
•   Marketing directors to determine where efforts need to be concentrated.
•   Supply chain to forecast future demand more accurately based on trends

Hella, the automotive parts supplier that develops and manufactures components and systems for lighting technology and electronics, has been using PHOCAS since 2004. Terry Fitzgerald, General Manager at Hella Australia commented:

“PHOCAS enables us to find out very easily and quickly what a customer is buying, when they are buying it and at what price. Most importantly, it throws up what a customer is NOT buying immediately. PHOCAS makes information mobile and real-time. Our database gets updated every day, not just in the office but for our remote reps on the road. It’s such a simple process; they simply log on and it’s all done.

Each morning sales reps are primed with powerful information for each customer call. There have been many instances where this has had a large impact on our bottom line. One recent example was that a customer had not started buying a new product that was selling well in his sector. The rep highlighted this and the customer has since taken the line on. Several examples like this happen every day. I can’t put a figure on what this is worth to our business but it must be pretty substantial.”

Julia Manley, Sales & Marketing Manager at Phocas commented:
“The credit crunch means that businesses are now more than ever focused on ROI and the need to maximise tangible value out of current data.  PHOCAS really empowers the user; it instantly delivers essential and undiscovered data which enables sales teams to make quick decisions and gives them greater comprehension and understanding of what is happening with their customer base”.