Year founded: 1986
Employees: 70
Situation: Heartstrings Enterprises needed a business management solution that could keep up with their growth in sales and employee size
Software previously used: QuickBooks
Solution: Implemented the Oracle Small Business Suite
Results: 10% reduction in costs, 70% increase in annual sales

Heartstrings Enterprises is a wholesaler of customized jewelry and gifts. Their services include engraving monograms, collegiate emblems, sorority letters, and corporate logos on the products they sell. Heartstrings has over 2,000 customers across the country.

Heartstrings needed a business management solution that could keep up with their growth. They were struggling with QuickBooks's limit of five concurrent users, as they needed more and more employees accessing the system as sales grew. They also needed a better way of tracking and analyzing their increasing sales than QuickBooks could offer.

They considered other solutions like Business Works, UA Software, and Peachtree, but none match Oracle Small Business Suite's combination of expandability to an unlimited number of users, the security of having our data stored off-site, easy import of QuickBooks data, and a relatively easy-to-use interface.

Heartstrings implemented the Oracle Small Business Suite to allow more of their employees access-a necessity to handle their growing sales. "Now when we hire employees, it takes only a few clicks to add them as a user of the Suite. We don't have to look for installation CD-ROMs and we don't have to worry about hitting a limit," says Jim Storbeck, Vice President of Heartstrings. The Suite has helped Heartstrings improve their customer support, as well: "Our customer service staff likes how easy it is to search for a customer and to slice and dice their transaction history." Because the Suite centralizes all of a customer's data into one record, customer service does not have to cobble together contact information, open invoices, and payments histories from different applications.

Their entire sales and order handling process has improved with the Suite. "Oracle provides us with more searchable formats to track sales by class and by sales rep. We have also integrated the Sales Order function into our business process to better track orders in-house." Invoicing, customer statement generation, and checking inventory statuses are all much easier to perform now with an integrated solution.

Heartstrings has seen a decrease of approximately 10% in overall costs due to improved efficiency in dealing with customers and processing orders. They have also seen a significant increase in sales since switching to Oracle Small Business Suite: "Since we started using the Suite, our sales are 70% above the previous year's. We could not have managed that growth without the flexibility of adding more users and having a powerful, yet easy-to-use interface."

Experience the Oracle Small Business Suite for yourself by starting a free trial. Or schedule a live demo and a representative can guide you through the areas of the Suite that interest you most.