Manual No More: How Illuminis Gave This Equine Business a Data Backbone.
Equilibrium Products juggled spreadsheets from distributors, Sage 50, and manual forecasts. Illuminis pulled it all together — transforming how they track best-sellers, top customers, and sales trends.
The Challenge
Equilibrium Products Limited is a designer and manufacturer of equine products,
all of which are carefully designed to meet the specific needs of horses and their
devoted owners. Margaret Donnelly, an expert on product development, started the
company in 2001. It has grown steadily ever since, selling their specialised products
online and through distributors.
“Our two key distributors update us by spreadsheet on the sales they’ve made, either on
the previous day or the previous week. Before Octelas, we used to spend hours manually
transferring all of this data into a centralised spreadsheet so we could keep track of total
sales. But even so, we found it almost impossible – without a huge amount of additional
time and effort – to identify our best selling lines and most valuable customers.”
Margaret Donnelly,
Equilibrium Products
The Company
Equilibrium Products was born from one horse’s struggle — and one owner’s determination to help. When Timmy’s headshaking inspired the creation of the Net Relief Muzzle Net, it sparked a movement that’s been improving horses’ lives for over 25 years. From that first breakthrough to award-winning products like the Field Relief Max, our mission has stayed the same: making a real difference to horses around the world.
We’re horse owners ourselves, with over a century of combined experience and a deep commitment to quality. Every product is carefully researched, rigorously tested, and backed by a one-year guarantee — so you can trust it’s designed with your horse’s comfort, health, and happiness in mind.
How Octelas helped deliver the data
Having been introduced to Illuminis Insight Software Limited, Margaret was keen to
hear how they might be able to help. Illuminis MD, Paul North recalls:
“When I met Margaret to discuss her reporting needs, I recognised a familiar problem
common to many businesses. Equilibrium Products generates data from multiple sources
and so just helping her get better reporting out of her Sage 50 package was only going to
be a partial solution. She needed to be able to be able to get answers from all of her data
– so that meant combining the information sitting in Sage 50 with the spreadsheets from
the sales distributors and, on top of that, the budgets and forecasts she was also holding
in spreadsheets at that time”.
The Solution
The solution turned out to be very straightforward: Octelas pulls all data generated
by a business – whether from accounting packages, ERP, CRM and workflow systems
as well as automatically uploading spreadsheet data – into a single database.
“Highly customised to their specific needs, we were able to provide Margaret’s team with
an automatic upload of the sales data from distributors directly from spreadsheet into
Octelas.
“Octelas business reporting
software from Illuminis was the answer. It has transformed the way we do business.”
Margaret Donnelly
Managing Director
