Revolutionising Operations on the Road to Becoming Digitally Strategic with FMI

Launched in 1995, FMI is headquartered in Dublin and supported by their office in Belfast. FMI offer a full end to end solution for consumer brands in the Irish market. They offer 5 key pillars of service: Warehousing and logistics, Commercial Management, Sales and Merchandising, Customer Experience and Customer Engagement & Insights. Their flexible approach allows them to work with a wide range of consumer brands from smaller artisan companies to large blue chip industry leaders. FMI’s business is centered around building and growing consumers brands on the Island of Ireland.

In 2021, FMI were awarded the Outsource Partnership of the Award at the CCMA awards with Electric Ireland.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the FMI team were cognizant of the importance of Digital Strategy and its long-term benefit to their business. They recruited a Digital Marketing Director to map out their Digital Strategy. However, once the pandemic hit and priorities shifted, the team struggled to identify a key starting point to kick-off their digital roadmap. Time, resources and digital expertise within their team also brought about some challenges when chartering the course for their DT journey. FMI decided to seek expert input to take their Digital Strategy to the next level and applied for the Digitalisation voucher with Enterprise Ireland (EI). Through this, they began their Digital Transformation journey with ActionPoint as an Approved EI Vendor.

Working with ActionPoint’s DT team, Libby and her team engaged in an initial analysis of their business. FMI has a significant volume of operational and customer data generated on a daily basis, with the potential to provide compelling insights and business value for FMI and its customers. After the initial engagement, the team took part in a half-day workshop where they mapped out how the business can leverage these insights to improve Customer Experience (CX), digitise internal operations and harness a data driven culture within their team.

Following the Digital Accelerator process and the insights it delivered, FMI steered its focus on recommendations for three key areas of their business. By allocating ‘system champions’ to each new implementation, the proactive team at FMI had kicked-off some of ActionPoint’s key recommendations before the engagement had even concluded, which were:

· Report Automation: Data and insights for both their customers and internally are core to helping FMI to deliver their services. By creating automated reporting workflows, FMI will reap the benefits of more insightful and accurate data along with long-term time and cost-savings.

· Integration of Payroll System: Prior to FMI’s engagement with ActionPoint, their payroll process was manual, meaning it was a time- consuming and inefficient process with a large staff to pay. Based on the Accelerator recommendations, FMI deployed a payroll management system that has been a critical change in digitising internal operations.

· Contact Centre Technology: FMI Agents were constantly having to switch between 3 applications, which was leading to a less desirable customer experience (CX). In order to remove human effort from transactional tasks, ActionPoint’s Digital transformation team recommended the use of AI enabled chat, live chat and social media. There was also a focus on integrating the contact centre systems BXP with Telephony, establishing a consolidated view of Omni-channel activity, as well as agent dashboards with 360 visibility across the business, to help improve CX.