One of the most invaluable functions of Arx is the Purchase Planning module, which looks at sales figures for each product, taking into account whether it has been or will be on special offer, and suggests the purchase orders required based on the supplier's lead time, minimum safety stock etc. As a result, the order fill rate is 98% on a product range of over 2,500, with total SKUs over 10,000.

With around 400 different products on offer each month, available to both mail order customers and retailers, over 800 price changes are made by the Arx Special Offer Generator, which puts forward products to offer in order to maximise profit.

Promotions performance is reported on monthly, showing: which products have sold to which groups of prospects / customers, with annual comparisons; the changing channels through which orders are received; the changes in advertising response rates, catalogues and mailings all have to be monitored for costs, responses and margins achieved. Arx holds all the required information to make informed decisions.

The Dolls House Emporium also has a retail shop on site processing 22,000 orders per annum, on an EPOS system which is fully-integrated with the Arx database, allowing monitoring of customer activity through all sales channels.

Of particular benefit in today's shopping environment has been the full integration of the www.dollshouse.com website with the Arx database, ensuring consistency across all channels and customer information being queried in real time. Orders are seamlessly entered into the Arx system for immediate despatch, and accepts payments in Sterling, Euros and US Dollars. E-mailouts are also handled intelligently.

Customer relationship management is also high on the list of priorities for The Dolls House Emporium, and the opinions of their dolls' house collectors are sought in many and varied questionnaires. The responses are keyed in using the Safewire Quick Code technology, and responses from the website automatically imported into the Arx database. Result are then output for analysis.