Metals Direct Discusses Why They Chose e-conomic.

Metals Direct was established in 2009 by Lennie Gent after 40 years of service in the industry. The company specializes in trading and distributing non ferrous metals.

Lennie and his daughter are joined in the family business and he puts their success so far on her excellent influence, the tricks of the trade he's picked up over the years, and his well-estabilshed reputation in the metals industry. Lennie refers to himself as a technophile, often called in good humour as 'Gizmo Man' by his friends and customers.

He cherishes his projects, wide variety of clients and the depth of knowledge he calls on to meet their exact needs. For instance, he’s recently began working with stainless steel in order to create parts for tills at Tesco and working with brass to make ball bearings for use on naval fire boats – turning shopping to shipping in one day!

As he expands his customer base, Lennie has chosen external transport and doesn’t maintain a warehouse so he's carefully working the low overheads card to the maximum. His customers tend to be engineers but are a very diverse group, ranging from food factory maintenance operatives to engineers producing their own equipment.


What is the size of your company?
Currently it’s Lennie & Daugther.

What level and which of the available functions do you use on the system?
Metals Direct is live with 33 customers at the moment.

Is an online accounting function important for your business? Why?
Lennie happens to be on the road a lot of the time and needs to keep updated so the luxury of accessing e-conomic from wherever he is, whenever he wants is a huge advantage. As is, he adds, the comparably cheap price for a very good system.
In his view e-conomic is small and flexible but big and capable! It also gives him the confidence of knowing he could offer a product range of half a million different stock items and e-conomic would take it in its stride.

What has your experience been of using e-conomic – the positives and the negatives?
Since Lennie can access his computer a lot whilst out of the office, he is very appreciative of the fact that the system times-out if you’re not active for a specific time, a welcome and necessary security point.

e-conomic has successfully proven to be flexible enough to offer everything Lennie is looking for. In example, traceability in his supply chain and providing certificates to customers is absolutely neccessary. All metals have individual part and group numbers and the system allows him to continually evaluate the way in which products are moving. Also, because he doesn’t carry much stock, he is able to buy in at short notice and with accuracy. He makes sure to mention that opening a new group couldn’t be any simpler.

When asked about negatives, Lennie couldn’t put his finger on any but wanted to add that when it comes to remote usage, he felt his hotel in Cape Verde from where he had no trouble accessing e-conomic, was about as remote as you might get and the system still worked perfectly.

Have you made savings using e-conomic?
Having worked for the past 10 years with his accountant, Richard Sullivan, Lennie asked for suggestions for a reasonably priced, easy to use, accessible accounting software. whereby e-conomic was suggested and it was Lennie's first time coming across e-conomic's application.

The fact that e-conomic has its own back up and that the system is constantly updated are big positives in Lennnie’s opinion as is the fact that Richard can access the system remotely which cuts out office visits and consequently numerous expenses. Lennie’s had some experience with Sage but finds e-conomic both more useable and user-friendly.