It's amazing what Notes can do

With sales of 360 million DM and around 3,000 employees, the KUNERT group is one of the largest hosiery manufacturers in Europe and across the world. The company has a history going back 90 years. Founded in 1907 in Warnsdorf, Northern Bohemia, by the beginning of the Second World War, the company developed into the largest European manufacturer of nylon hosiery. Following expropriation and escape, a new start was made in Immenstadt/Allgäu. With the familiar brands KUNERT, HUDSON and BURLINGTON, the KUNERT group is again market leader in the top-end department store and specialist textile outlet sector.

As a group holding, KUNERT AG coordinates the different brands and provides central services, including in the area of IT. The increasing need for field sales work based on perfectly prepared data accurate to the day caused the company to launch a project based on Lotus Notes in 1997.

Following the definition of sales processes, the solution was initially drawn up on the basis of customer-specific programming by a software partner. However, the high volume of data and complexity of the communication concept in connection with Lotus Notes and AS/400 did not bring the success the company had hoped for. In its search for a different partner, the company found DIQ Software GmbH in mid 1998. The decisive factor here was first that DIQ had both Lotus Notes knowledge and many years of experience with AS/400. However, from the outset DIQ advised against using the results of the previous project as the basis for cooperation. Instead, it recommended the use of established standard software and the modification of this software to the requirements of KUNERT so that future enhancements could be carried out separately from each other. Following verification that this procedure was feasible, a decision was made to use GEDYS Sales. Based on GEDYS Sales, KUNERT had made more progress in just a few weeks that it had achieved in the previous project, not least because it had since changed its priorities: while interest initially focused on supporting order-oriented processes, the company now wanted to strengthen sales using the existing operational data. This brought the maximum possible benefit in the shortest possible time.

With increasing acceptance on the part of internal and external sales staff, the requirements grew - as did identification with GEDYS Sales. Last year, the company was close to having GEDYS Sales translated into French by DIQ Software GmbH. The internationalization of GEDYS AG came just in time here. KUNERT AG was able to just have the enhancements to GEDYS Sales translated and when the French version of GEDYS Sales is available, it will be using this too.