Jon Marius Roald
The IT department at Cabot Hosiery Mills were overwhelmed with M3 requests. The solution had effects reaching far beyond freeing up IT's time.
– For many business users, M3 can be an intimidating product. It is undeniably powerful, but it comes with a steep learning curve, says Mark Cooper.
He's a solution architect at Cabot Hosiery Mills, a textile manufacturer based in Vermont, USA.
Some years back, they implemented M3 Cloud Suite. It took some getting used to, but soon enough, employees embraced the new system. With that, they also started seeing opportunities for improvements. This quickly led to a bottleneck.
– Our IT department was overwhelmed with M3 requests, both about data maintenance and ideas for improvements. The developers were backed up, which kept the M3 users waiting and prevented IT from focusing on their core tasks, Cooper recalls.
More responsive than ever
Cabot Hosiery Mills needed to deal with this, and started looking for a tool that would put ownership of business data back into the users' hands. The solution turned out to be an Excel add-in by Vince.
– The Vince add-in allows our business users to work in a tool they are already comfortable with: Excel. It enables them to view the data they need, label processes in ways that make sense to them and create their own workflows – all without having to involve developers, says Cooper.
This new way of working has put data ownership back in the hands of the business users, which has led to a more diverse range of use cases.
– More people are interacting with M3, which has made us able to respond to changes faster than ever before, the solution architect adds.
Engagement and cooperation
Working with Cabot Hosiery Mills has been inspiring for Vince, too, says managing director of Vince US, Elaine Stewart:
– Their IT department is constantly finding new, innovative use cases for our solutions, as well as leading the way in empowering the business to take ownership of their data and become more self-sufficient.
The US-based textile manufacturer showcases the true value of developing Vince power users, which has led to both stronger engagement and collaboration between the business and the IT teams.
– It’s feedback like this that I love to share with other customers, as the benefits extend far beyond data maintenance and time savings. This kind of impact is what drives us, Stewart declares.
"Create a Vince"
When Cabot Hosiery Mills migrated from on-premise M3 to Cloud Suite, they also transitioned from on-premise Vince to Vince's cloud solutions, gaining access to all of Vince's solutions.
– The difference has been significant. The cloud solution is faster, more user-friendly and gives us access to a much bigger toolkit, which has sparked interest in our users, says Cooper.
– It’s really led to a lot of a-ha moments where our users are actively looking for new opportunities and use Vince as a way to simplify processes and create better workflows. They call it "to create a Vince".
