How Graphite Additive Manufacturing Has Increased Business Revenue with AMFG’s Workflow Software
“At Graphite, we offer market-leading expertise in polymer 3D printing technologies and materials. Our aim is to bridge the gap between rapid prototyping and low-volume production.”
Business Development Manager
The Challenge
Graphite Additive Manufacturing has two brands: Graphite, which serves the company’s industrial clients, and 3D Print Direct, which is targeted at individual designers, engineers and inventors.
Being able to efficiently process the different order values of the two segments was a key challenge the company faced. Graphite, therefore, needed to find a better way to manage its order management and quoting processes, and spend less time on manually processing orders.
“As the demand for our services was increasing, we recognised the need to automate our quoting and ordering process. We found that we were, for example, spending an equal amount of time processing a £10,000 order as we were on an order worth £50,” explains Jonathan. “We needed to find a way to better streamline the process for specific projects.”
“As the volume of enquiries we were starting to receive was increasing, we knew we needed to be able to respond instantly to our clients’ requests,” says Jonathan.
The Solution
The Graphite team recognised that software was needed to streamline and manage the company’s ordering workflow.
The company soon opted for AMFG’s workflow software, following a demonstration of the software platform in action. For Graphite, it was important to ensure ease-of-use for both the Graphite team and its customers.
“AMFG’s software has a really user-friendly interface, and it’s given us everything we need to streamline some of those lower-value orders and allow the project team to spend more time on projects requiring more in-depth technical help and assistance,” says Jonathan.
“We also liked the level of service we have received from AMFG — the communication and support has been fantastic. We can always pick up the phone, and it’s been great having training sessions with the AMFG team in person. We feel valued as a customer, which is what all customers want to feel.”
With the AMFG platform, including AMFG’s instant quotation tool, Graphite’s project team was able to:
- Process orders quickly and easily
- View project statuses and updates in real time
- Streamline the request to ordering workflow
The Results
“Our turnover has increased by 20%+ year-on-year over the last three years,” says Jonathan. “In the last year alone, we’ve generated over £50,000 revenue just through the instant quotation tool with an average order value of £62.00.
“Now, it takes a fraction of the time to process orders through the AMFG platform, instead of the manual process that was previously in place. “This allows us to deal with the increasing volume of enquiries without compromising on service,” says Jonathan.
“Implementing software has enabled us to focus on what we’re good at — manufacturing parts — and letting software experts focus on that side of things. We recognised that establishing working partnerships with experts in this field like AMFG was key for us to hit our growth targets.”
With the company committed to focusing on production parts, the need for repeatability and build accuracy is more important than ever. Workflow software will be important to this process.
Plans for business expansion
Graphite is expanding rapidly, and the company has recently relocated to a larger site. With this expansion comes the need for even greater process optimisation.
“We want to ensure that the time spent processing jobs is optimised,” says Jonathan. “If we can automate more of the paperwork and back-office systems, then this will benefit us and our customers in the long run.”
“Ultimately, we want to ensure that we continue to provide our customers with a world-class level of service. If we’d continued as we were, we would only be able to grow so quickly — but we want to have the right systems in place to ensure that we’ll be able to hit our growth targets.
“We’re looking forward to working with AMFG to automate more of our backend and production tasks, make processing orders simpler and help achieve our plans for expansion.”
Images courtesy of Graphite.
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