I decided to choose our work with Coniston Corporate - www.corporate-embroidery.co.uk - as a case study because while the specifics of the projects are, of course, tailored to their business needs, there are some elements of the software that apply to many businesses, especially those that buy in raw materials, add some value and then sell on to other businesses or the general public.
Coniston sell workwear and other clothing, which they embroider for their customers. Driven by a very capable MD, Paul Reilly - from whom I have learnt a thing or two - the company has grown significantly yet maintained its success over the last few years. When I first met Paul, the company had a set of slick paper-based processes in place but as the business grew the overhead of maintaining the paperwork was becoming a serious overhead and also a risk to the business.
Quite apart from the concerns around pieces of paper getting mislaid and related issues around business recovery, there were some other challenges that were not easy to meet with a paper-based system:
- Ensuring that corresponding supplier orders went out to meet the requirements of the customer orders that were being received.
- Ensuring that when supplier orders came in, that the right customer orders were identified and prioritised for production.
- Reporting on margins to make sure that while Coniston offered the best price to their customers, they were making the right profit to sustain and grow their business.
- Keeping on top of their invoicing and statements, especially as customer orders were not always shipped in one delivery.
As is our usual practice, we took the time to listen to Coniston's requirements but also to understand the business context in which those requirements were set. The enabled us not only to devise the most appropriate software solution but also to deliver an application that was designed to develop with their business strategy.
Briefly, the software works like this: when a customer order is received, the items required from a supplier are automatically added to a supplier order (and the system caters for the fact that these items may come from different suppliers.) At the end of each working day, the supplier orders can be printed for faxing or sent by email, depending on the supplier's preference.
When a supplier order is received, the system identifies the customer orders that can now be processed and, when that work is marked as complete, the invoices are generated. The invoices can be printed for posting, sent as a system generated PDF by email or both.
This brings me to an interesting point. When we build systems like this, they naturally and implicitly hold information about the business itself, which is built up through usage. It is very easy for us then to write reports that the client can access whenever they want, such as number of orders this month, total and average values, comparisons with the equivalent period in prior years and so on. This is incredibly valuable business information and it is available easily and on demand without recourse to us.
It is, I think, apparent from the above, that a system that supports a business in this fashion, saves on tiresome - and error prone – administration. Furthermore, the salaries that are saved by not having to employ extra administrative staff can be seen as a method by which the software effectively pays for itself.
Incidentally, once we had the complete working database for Coniston, it also enabled us to build a dedicated site for the workwear - www.coniston-workwear.co.uk - at a relatively low cost, as well as the 'Coniston Shop' function, which gives Paul the facility to set up online shops for his clients: you can see examples here and here. Incidentally, Paul requires no input from us each time he wants to set up a new shop.
Finally, I would just say that even though I picked the above example because it contains elements that apply to many businesses, it is a source of constant interest to me how different companies ask us to implement them in different ways. Over the last five years particularly, it has become obvious to me how few business needs are genuinely met by a package solution.
No comments:
Post a Comment