About Rainbow Design

Established in 1990, Rainbow Design serves the B2B contract furniture market providing a range of services including furniture and workplace consultancy. Following a number of years of significant growth winning clients of well-known brands covering sectors from financial services to football, and retail to media, Rainbow Design’s existing processes were now holding them back. They needed a solution to help them scale the business further.

Moving beyond manual processing

Rainbow Design relied on MS Office programmes to quote, raise invoices and manage client accounts. There was a lot of double-entry and without one system that gave full oversight of the pipeline, staff were forced to chase people to find out what was happening with specific orders and projects. Knowing they needed to streamline their processes, initially they tried an American solution built for software sales and tried adapting it to their processes, but it didn’t work;

“We endeavoured to adapt it to our purposes and it did a lot of things but it was imperfect in a lot of ways. We’re very specific in the way we work, and it didn’t help that we had to wait until the end of the day for someone to help us because of the time zones. We like to have a relationship and deal with people face-to-face.” said Account Manager, Chris Grenville.

Workhorse’s custom solution

Workhorse sat down with Rainbow Design and planned out their processes and requirements in detail. The result was a comprehensive modular system that unified their system and data and enabled the business to run their order fulfilment process efficiently. The final Workhorse Business Plus system includes: contact and supplier management, projects, purchase orders, invoicing, service calls and a dynamic product catalogue.

With 95+% of the business focussed on furniture sales, it was important that the product catalogue was dynamic and not static. With hundreds of suppliers, with hundreds of lines of products at their disposal, they needed a catalogue that could easily change and develop with every client order and produce quotes fast and accurately.

The simple, one-click time-savers

Right from the start, Workhorse was saving Rainbow time and energy. Grenville estimates that the time-saving is over 2 days per month, per person. “Just being able to run an invoice, rather than type each one out individually saves so much time, you wouldn’t believe,” commented Grenville. “It’s also all the small things that make a big difference. We took the time to plan lots of time-saving functions. For example, just being able to click and select a warehouse address to be added to documentation saves time and improves accuracy.”

The automation Workhorse provides is reaping dividends for the business; “It’s kind of in the name, it’s a workhorse,” added Grenville. “It takes the burden away from so much effort of what we need to do, automating and streamlining processes and giving us a bird’s eye view of where we are, it’s incredibly useful. Now we can just get on with the day.”

How we helped HOWE

Workhorse helped HOWE to move away from manual processes.