“ease-elease is hard to
beat as a method of
managing your own
business portfolio”
Case Study
Name: Rob Simcock
Company: DMC Business Machines
“The atmosphere is buoyant at DMC Business Machines as the company goes from strength
to strength, partly,” says Sales Director Rob Simcock, “because of its willingness to embrace
new web based solutions such as ease-elease from Siemens Financial Services.”
“I can keep an eye on what the sales people are doing. If
With strong sales and a 98% customer retention rate, DMC Business Machines were looking for ways to
consolidate business growth and were keen to use Siemens Financial Services’ new web based leasing
solution. Launched in February 2001, ease-elease has already created a thriving eBusiness community
and has accurately processed more than £150 million of leasing applications to date. Rob Simcock, Sales
Director of DMC, assesses its usefulness.
there are weaknesses in anyone’s way of working, it’s very
DMC Business Machines sells and leases digital photocopiers, networked digital imaging solutions,
plasma screens and other office equipment to companies throughout the UK. Seventy percent of its
business is backed by leasing agreements, principally with Siemens Financial Services (SFS).
improvement. Nobody feels ‘big brother is watching you’.
“SFS gets the first bite of the cherry” says Simcock, who heads up the company’s two direct sales teams,
one in Manchester, the other in Croydon. “Their rates are extremely competitive and they also give us
good service. But to be honest, we can get that from most finance houses. The difference is that SFS are
now offering a fast, easy to use on-line leasing facility as well, and this is helping us to streamline the
way we do business.
Given the reluctance of some business equipment
easy for me to spot. ease-elease can show us what people
are attempting to do and why they’re not performing.
There may be training issues to be addressed and if so, we
can get onto that right away and identify strategies for
That isn’t how we operate. We work as a team and we’re
interested in increasing sales by all means possible.”
suppliers to investigate how eBusiness solutions could
grow sales, how would Simcock persuade others to get
on-line?
“It hasn’t been plain sailing in this industry, that’s true,” he
says. “One of SFS’s competitors came up with an on-line
“Until 8 months ago, we were putting proposals through one of their competitors.
offering, but quite frankly it didn’t work. It took ages to
In August SFS came back into the frame with a demonstration of ease-elease. We
load and you had to key in all the information yourself.
were convinced that it was the way forward and switched the bulk of our business
ease-elease is a different story, you just put in the company
to SFS straight away. We had been waiting for one of the leasing companies to
name or the postcode, for example, and the system
come up with an on-line offering and we were keen to get on board.”
completes the rest of the information in seconds. It’s a
Instant reporting means better portfolio management
huge time saver. Training is not an issue. It only takes
about 15 minutes to get the hang of it and it’s very
While ease-elease offers a variety of different tools for finding, winning, writing
intuitive. In terms of technical support, we’ve had very
and managing business, Simcock singles out portfolio management as the most
little call to contact either the on-line team or the telephone
useful feature.
helpdesk.”
“ease-elease gives us immediate access to all our own data and you can come at it
Information rich ease-elease has all the answers
from so many different angles. It gives us a much better handle on the business
“When we run a credit check, ease-elease can often give a
as a whole. This is instant reporting - something we’ve never had before - and
result within 90 seconds. That’s a real breakthrough in
something you certainly can’t get on the phone.”
terms of getting the proposal processed in record time.
“I can see how many proposals we’ve made this
month, how many have been accepted, who’s
propped what, plus the total value – all at a glance.
You get written confirmation by email immediately and if
the answer is ‘no’, we can track the reason and see if it’s
worth pursuing. If not, we say goodbye, and move on. It’s
as simple as that.”
I don’t have to issue a request and wait for people
to get back to me. I can work at home in the
ease-elease users can also explore the sales opportunities
evening if I want to, which makes it doubly
created by ease-elease’s new business prospecting tool, a
convenient.”
vast database containing around 2 million records of UK
organisations, with a wide range of search criteria. Used
When it comes to monitoring the performance
to the full this facility can be ‘mined’ for valuable
of individual team members, Simcock
information and users can drill down for more
also praises the new application.
detail,whilst in the process of generating proposals.
“Yes, of course, all this information is available elsewhere,
but it wouldn’t necessarily be updated daily as this is and
it certainly wouldn’t be free. We regard this part of the
site as a valuable resource and will use it more in the
months to come.”
ease-elease community continues to grow
ease-elease features
Determined to provide a best in class eBusiness
The ease-elease interface can be customised to suit your
application, Siemens Financial Services are committed to a
business, offering easy access to those business tools
programme of continual improvement for ease-elease and
which you will use most frequently.
are making sure that it evolves in a way which will
guarantee increased profitability
• Secure
and business efficiency for its
users. To this end, all members
of the development team are in
regular contact with their on-line
community to harness their
ideas and implement suggestions
on how the system can be
• Proposal generation
• Rate calculator
• Automatic underwriting
• Proposal tracking
improved.
“Obviously, there’s still work to be done,”
says Simcock, “but the ease-elease team
do listen to suggestions on how we can
get the best out of the system. The system
• Instant upgrade figures
• Document printing
• Email progress reports
changes all the time and the company
appears to value our input. Already, easeelease is a core part of our service to
• Searchable database of
UK companies
customers and is certainly the best
offering so far from a leasing company.”
• Document library
“At the end of the day,” concludes Simcock, “the price of
• Training tools
finance is important but it’s not the be all and end all. SFS
have given us a useful additional tool with which to build
our business in a manner that will be mutually rewarding.
• Business links
and resources
At the moment they’re the only finance providers who have
achieved this.”
To find out more
Siemens Financial Services Limited
For further information
Townsend House,
E-mail: info@sfs-uk.com
160 Northolt Road,
Harrow, Middlesex
HA2 0PG
Tel: 020 8422 7101
Fax: 020 8422 4402
www.siemensfinancialservices.co.uk
or visit www.ease-elease.com