As Director of Marketing and Sales Administration for a Haute Couture House, I needed a very flexible and reliable management system for data processing. The challenge for the company was to offer a tool that communicates key production dates to all employees, as well as to monitor purchasing, customer management, sales administration and, ultimately, the cost price of each dress in order to guarantee our profitability objectives. In other words, an ambitious development project!

For an exceptional activity, I needed a custom tool, and FileMaker quickly became obvious to me compared to a standardized management software. FileMaker’s flexibility combined with the listening of the 1-more-thing team was decisive in my choice.

Within a few weeks, we were able to implement an elegant solution that could be used both at the office on a PC and on the iPad from the workshop, the fitting room or when visiting our customers. Workshops can see fittings or raw material deliveries, while sales representatives manage their customer records at the same time as managers have access to a synthetic dashboard, all in real time.

And it is this notion of real time that is decisive because all services have the same information immediately and when Mr. Nordmann and his team intervene on the database, the modifications are also applied in real time.

The application thus designed is hosted on 1-more-thing servers in Belgium, thus completely exempting us from any heavy IT investment or complex network configuration. All over the world, we can view our data or enter new data on a computer or iPad.

At first, we were reluctant to outsource the design and hosting of our databases, but Mr. Nordmann’s expertise and availability finally convinced us. On the other hand, the ability of its team to offer simple solutions while guaranteeing us security and absolute confidentiality of data has been a reassuring element in launching the “virtual” management of company data.

Such a powerful and flexible IT tool is a real asset for an SME, which until a few years ago could never have invested in such a high-performance data management solution, and we see an improvement on a daily basis that makes me absolutely not regret my choice.

Christophe Jonquères d’Oriola

Director of Marketing and Sales Administration at Stéphane Rolland Haute Couture