Testimonials

Glasfit, South Africa’s fastest growing motor and flat glass fitment franchise and joint venture
network, uses a combination of Pastel Partner and Pastel Evolution to administer 77 fitment
centres as well as a distribution centre. It uses the same technology to add up to 15 new fitment
centres every year.

“At this point in our growth phase, I need to produce 55 separate monthly accounts covering all
of our different interests, including the Gauteng distribution centre that handles up to R10 million
in inventory every month,” says Hendrik Lamprecht, Glasfit’s financial manager. “Pastel
Evolution, which runs that distribution centre as well as our head office, and Pastel Partner,
which runs the regional distribution centres, enables me to do that pretty quickly.

“At the same time, the Pastel products linked to an add-on written for us by implementation
partner Trew Solutions, automate the processing of insurance claims and enables us to give
customers better service through our call centre.”

Initially, Glasfit fitment centres had to capture customer details on their own systems in order
to generate an invoice for insurance companies. They also had to calculate the excess
amounts.

The Trew Solutions add-on invoicing module now allows call centre agents to download
customer details to a fitment centre, where it automatically populates an insurance invoice and
calculates the excess. The invoice is then uploaded back to the call centre so that agents can
provide customers with the relevant information.

With Glasfit undergoing extremely rapid growth, it also needed a solution that would scale
easily.

“Which is why, having started out on Pastel Partner some seven years ago, we’ve simply
upgraded where necessary to Evolution,” Lamprecht says. “Why incur the disruption of a new
system when all our users are confident on Pastel?”

“We tried to make the roll-out of new fitment centres as easy as possible from a technology
point of view,” says Rochelle Booyens, project manager for Trew Solutions. “We wrote the
invoicing add-on and other customised items in such a way that they could be installed by
Glasfit’s own information technology (IT) staff as part of each new Pastel implementation.

“At this point in our growth phase, I need to produce 55 separate monthly accounts”

“Glasfit therefore has full business process standardisation across each of its fitment centres.
Each regional office works off exactly the same information for its month-end report to head
office, and there is no break in the continuity of information from the regions when a new centre
is opened.

“Glasfit also has the flexibility to consolidate information. It can also report on each business
centre separately – depending on the business need – without having to call us in. The fact that
Pastel products are so stable and easy to integrate with third party applications makes all that
possible.”

Steven Cohen, Softline Pastel’s managing director says that Glasfit is just one of the many
franchises that use Pastel to run their business.

“They trust it not only because of its track record as a ready-to-use accounting solution but
also because it is flexible enough to allow industry-specific add-on functionality developed on its
Software Development Kit (SDK),” says Cohen. “Pastel also offers strong reporting functionality
through its business intelligence add-on module, which is particularly useful from the franchisor
perspective.”