Interview with Sean Boos from Preferred Brands
Claromentis Interview with Sean Boos - Information Technology Director of Preferred Brands.
Burnsville, Minnesota.
Hi Sean, tell us a little bit about Preferred Brands
Preferred Brands is the parent company to some of the interior design and decorating industries’ leading marketing companies. Included are such brand leaders as Floor To Ceiling – a network of over 200 independently owned and operated retail showrooms located throughout the U.S. Each store specializes in offering a combination of flooring, kitchen & bath products and decorative accessories,best suited for that particular market. Also included in the Preferred Brands family is World of Floors, a leading flooring retailer, primarily serving Michigan and the upper Midwest.
Who were the intended users? How many of them?
We have 200+ dealers throughout the US.
Did the portal itself have a project or codename?
We call the portal: InFlo
What applications were most useful or essential in this project?
Document management and forms were probably the most important things.
What was the user response and take up of the system?
We found that the users have been very responsive to the new portal. They have found the address book to be very helpful along with the instant messaging.
Is your business more efficient? Have fundamental processes changed?
We have 100’s of vendors that we do business with which translates into tens of thousands of products which all need pricing files. The indexing/search and meta data features have been a pleasant surprise within the portal. The really allow us to provide detail custom properties for each file which makes finding what you want a snap.
Were you under any deadlines – if so what was the nature of them?
We had an extremely tight timeline. We had our national show in February and InFlo was the primary focus of the show. All products tested were becoming disasters in the making. What we typically found through our testing, was most portals did a great job of providing a hierarchical security model for one business unit, but when you starting to add more business units to the portal the security model really didn’t do what we wanted.
I contacted Claromentis 2 months before our show. Although I was very reluctant that anyone could really pull this off in 2 months, Nigel assured me that, while the timeframe was tight, Claromentis could meet our deadline.
Did the project meet your deadlines?
Yes. We actually had it live a week before the show
How involved were you in the design process?
Other than supplying some ideas, most of the design process was done by Claromentis
Do you have any comments on the final design?
As far as the UI, we gave our ideas to the Claromentis design team and after a few revisions, we got it done in about a week.
Do you find the system easy to use from an end user point of view?
We’ve had very positive responses from our end users.
How did you find the Claromentis pricing model?
Pricing, like most small businesses, is a very important part of the equation. Compared to other portal solutions, Claromentis was the best value for with probably a better feature mix.
“InFlo has allowed us to become more efficient in both time and money. In these difficult economic times, being able to stretch your dollars if very important. It has allows us to focus more on our core services and products and better serve our dealers.” Sean Boos.
Would you have any advice to companies considering Claromentis? Were there any special factors that were part of your selection process?
Claromentis is a very flexible platform. I come from more of a development background and I was amazed at how much I could integrate with the system.
Thank You Sean, we appreciate your time.
