ITEX Gaebler – Industrie – Textilpflege GmbH & Co. KG, which is located in Montabaur, produces a wide assortment of high quality working clothes for industry, manuel workers, trade, service and the catering business. The broad selection of varied work-clothing collections allows it’s customers to realise their required corperate design concepts. As a partner of the ‘Deutschen Berufskleider-Leasing GmbH DBL’ (German work-clothing leasing plc), ITEX Gaebler offers a wide ranging rental service for work clothing in the areas of Rheineland-Palatinate, North Rheine-Westphalian, Hesse and Saarland, with a regular collection and delivery service including the repair of damaged clothing. On a daily basis, over 7,500 items of clothing pass through the companies laundary. Founded in 1849, ITEX Gaebler today has 125 employees working for around 2,500 customers.

To optimise the gaining of new customers and support existing customers, ITEX Gaebler and it’s contracter DBL (Deutsche Berufskleider Leasing GmbH) are expanding the companies IT. In addition to the growing system landscape, the company possesses a customer management system. As project partner, SoftM Communications GmbH implemented the CRM software GEDYS IntraWare on the basis of Lotus Notes Domino and adapted it to suit the particular requirements of ITEX Gaebler. In order to enter the addresses from numerous data bases from the current IT into the customer managerment system and to put it in order, SoftM used a modern, specialised software written completely in JAVA - the SoftM DataConnector.

With modern technology, ITEX Gaembler – Industrie –Textilpflege GmbH & Co. KG accomplishes a truly brilliant achievement every day. The drivers of the companies own fleet of automobiles collect thousands of soiled textiles from customers in exactly planned tours. Washing machines clean the trousers, jackets and coats in an environmentally friendly and textile sparing manner so as to have the tour returning to their clients as quickly as possible. That all operates smoothly thanks to the efforts of committed and reliable employees, using the textiles clearly marked barcodes and extravagent technology. In 2006 IBEX Gaebler registered that, within the company, the technology functions, but they were still missing one building block – information technology. As a leading system, there is an individual market product solution, which runs on the ‘i’system from IBM (AS 400). In addition, further systems are involved, for example Lotus Notes Domino for e-mail communication, the standard software DKS from SoftM for financial book-keeping as well as ‘GPS-Auge’ for fleet navigation.. The building block missing in ITEX Gaebler’s IT was an instrument to support the production and service processes. A four man team, headed by marketing manager Dagmar Heinz, described, in a 38 page specification aided by external expert support, not only the starting position but also the system requirements at ITEX Gaebler. The formulation carried the title “Requirement profile for the selection of a software solution for the support of production and service processes (customer management system)”.

Dagmar Heinz and her colleagues named the goal of their software support for production and service management as: “A better exploitation of new customer potential, which means a higher acquisition success rate.” The formulation continued: “Unrelinquishable is a direct link with our external employees. The goal is to have our external employees working actively with the system. That means, preparing their contacts as well as documenting and maintaining them.” General process would include the integration of data bases and programmes, a simple and quickly understandable usability as well as the technical support of business process through ‘Workflows’. In great detail, the formulation listed, in table form, the technical qualities of the future system requirements. ITEX Gaebler wanted to establish which features the presented software already had to offer in it’s standard form and what could be supplemented by customizing.

Following diverse presentations, the contract went to SoftM Communications, who not only convinced with technical details, but also with numerous references. The decisive factor was that two other DBL contractors, W.Marwitz Textilpflege GmbH in Lüneburg and Eggers Textilpflege GmbH in Bückeberg, had already optimized their customer acquisitions and service processes with CRM installations from SoftM Communications. In a rough concept, SoftM Communications suggested the realisation of a new customer management system based on Lotus Notes Domino with GEDYS IntraWare. In order to transfare customer data from the product economising system, as well as data from interested parties using Excel files and an aged address management system, into the Notes data base, the supplementation of SoftM Communications was planned. This product is capable of reading data from diverse sources and sorting them into a clear, goal oriented system.

During the transfer of the data components – in total, some 50,000 addresses – into the Notes data base, a tool from SoftM was implemented in duplication, which not only compared ‘Strings’ and identical addresses, but also, using a clear formula, reliably identified possible duplicates with minimal spelling differences. Aside from the deletion of duplicates, this tool also allowed for the additional information from duplicates in the data records to be saved in the system.

Many of the 50,000 addresses could now be administered using the module ‘Contacts’ from GEDYS IntraWare and the DataConnector saw to it that, on a daily basis, newly stored data in the product economising system would now also be entered into the customer management system. Deletions from the procuct economising system would also be reliably undertaken by ‘Contacts’. ‘Contacts’ contains an administration from reading and handling rights, meaning all external employees would have the right to read and maintain the master data from his department.

ITEX Gaebler use almost all modules from GEDYS IntraWare. From the users point of view, the operation of the system always begins in the central starter module ‘Portal’. Here e-mails, appointments and ‘To-do’ tasks are immediately recognisable at all times. The search in the Notes data base is also run using the ‘Portal’. Whilst with the ‘Standard-Notes-Installations’ only the (full-text) search in a single data base is possible, using the product ‘SoftM DataFinder’, a complete data base search solution is achieved. Now it is possible, in the area of production, to search for numerous companies using a single characteristic, such as, all interested parties who, in the last six month period, haven’t drawn up a visitor reports.

With the marketing module, ITEX Gaebler can now plan campaigns, select focus groups and perform actions. The module is also capable of suverying customers to measure success. ‘Office’ is the module in which documents from customers and interested parties contact details can be stored. Letters, e-mails, visitor reports and notes from telephone calls, as well as other documents, are all saved here.

The CRM group calander – module ‘Schedule’ - is available in standard form without additions. Groups and their members are registered during the configuration. The CRM-Administrator can expand them and change their composition.

For the realisation of necessary workflows, SoftM Communications has the module ‘Workflow’. The ‘Workflow-Application’ from GEDYS IntraWare, can be combined with their own product, SoftM WorkflowForms, which has complaints/queries as its first Workflow applicatioin. Should an employee receive a query per telephone, they fill-out a formula on the screen and then click on which department is responsible for dealing with this issue. To use the example of the “Sewing” department - automatically the Workflow-Engine acknowledges, using a cyclical system through the data base, that there is a query to be furthered to the “Sewing” department. This process is initiated with an e-mail link. As soon as the lost button has been replaced, the sewing department passes the occurance on as ‘Done’.