Case studies by Meantime IT

Coniston Corporate Embroidery provides work-wear and bespoke embroidery to its clients, which range from large national companies to small local businesses. Orders can be anything from one garment to thousands, each with a personalised logo or slogan, but the company prides itself on giving the same attention to detail to every order regardless of its size.

Stressed out staff

Established in 2000, for the first seven years Coniston Corporate’s managing director Paul Reilly ran the company using a paper-based ordering and administration system, with Sage for the company’s accounting processes. And although this system enabled the company to expand in its formative years, the inflexibility of the off-the-shelf package coupled with the margin for human error in logo design was causing unnecessary stress for the staff. And because garments could be produced from a verbal order, errors could go unchecked until the order had been despatched, resulting in costly returns.

MD Paul was convinced that there was a much simpler way to process orders and eliminate the problems the company was encountering, but he couldn’t find a ready-made package that suited the way his business worked. Although the paper-based system was open to error, he and his 14 staff had developed it in a way that suited the company and switching processes to fit a pre-designed software package would mean a compromised solution. So he turned to bespoke software development company Meantime IT, who designed him a bespoke system that worked exactly as he wanted it to.

A very specific spec

"I had a very specific system in mind when I approached Meantime," explains Paul. "As well as needing a total revamp of the look and functionality of our website, we wanted an administration system that would process every stage of the order from the initial enquiry through to design, ordering the required stock, and delivery and invoicing that could be accessed by every member of staff involved in production."

But, more importantly, Coniston Corporate needed to include a process within its software that wouldn’t let any manufacturing go ahead until the design had been officially approved by the client.

"It may sound simple enough to get right, but some clients don’t really know what they want until they’ve seen it for real,” says Paul. “So even if we’ve taken a telephone order where we’ve carried out every aspect of the client’s instruction to the letter, when the items are delivered they are rejected as unsuitable. With the software Meantime developed, the system will automatically email our designs to the client and won’t let us proceed with the order until they have been officially signed off."

Automate to accumulate

Fenner Pearson is Meantime’s managing director. He explains: "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. And quite apart from the concerns around pieces of paper going missing, there were other challenges that were difficult to meet with a paper-based system."

Coniston Corporate doesn’t hold any stock on-site, so Meantime’s system had to ensure clients were able to choose from 25,000 different items, with re-ordering being completely automated as soon as the order is inputted into the system.

Fenner continues: "A major part of the software we designed for Coniston Corporate was ensuring that supplier orders were generated to meet the requirements of customer orders, and then making sure that when the supplies were delivered, the right customer orders were identified and prioritised for production.

"We also built in an automatic margin reporting system, to make sure that while Coniston offered the best price to its customers, there were enough profits to sustain and grow the business. Automatic invoicing and statements then followed, drastically streamlining the whole process."

Fewer errors, more pounds

Paul agrees. "When an order is made, we check our system to see if it’s a current customer and if so, we’ll have all their preferences on file," he says. "If it’s a new customer, we’ll input their requirements before we select the required garments from our database of suppliers, then we add the logo in the correct position and email it to the customer for approval. While that’s happening, the system is working away in the background to order the required amount of garments from the supplier, so as soon as the customer gives the go-ahead, production can start with the touch of a button."

And although customers will receive the same speedy turnaround they’ve grown to expect with Coniston, the automated processing system means that Coniston’s error margin has dropped from 5% to 1%. "And when you’re producing millions of pounds worth of garments each year, that’s a huge return," says Paul.

After the initial outlay of £9,000 and several days spent inputting data into the system over the course of a month, the benefits the system has brought have been threefold – for staff, clients and the company itself.

Goodbye paper-chase

For the staff, the endless paper-chasing has been eliminated, and along with it a huge amount of stress. Each of them can check progress of every order at any stage from any location with web access, meaning that urgent orders can be completed from home if necessary rather than staying in the office after hours.

And for their clients, not only has their contact with Coniston Corporate become streamlined – when they call to check the progress of their order, they can find out immediately what stage it’s in, from any member of staff – they have the added advantage of being able to add an online shop facility to their own websites as a way of generating revenue. Orders are automatically processed and despatched by Coniston Corporate, giving Coniston’s clients an automatic profit for a small initial outlay.

And having so much information about every client has meant that Coniston’s sales and marketing has become a lot more efficient, resulting in more sales. "It makes me shudder when I think about all the lost opportunities for marketing before we implemented the new system," says Paul. "Over the years we must have had hundreds if not thousands of enquires that weren’t logged and have been lost forever. Now, we log everything – even the most random enquiry – and then we can send our carefully targeted mailers so people remember us the next time they want something, and we’ve seen an excellent return."

Software that pays for itself

As a result, Coniston Corporate Embroidery has been able to grow and expand in a way that wouldn’t have been possible using the old off-the-shelf and paper-based system. In the two years the bespoke web-based software has been in operation, Coniston has grown by 8% each year, showing a clear cost benefit of ongoing investment into the software.

"When we build systems like the one we made for Coniston they naturally hold information about the business itself which is built up through usage," says Fenner. "It’s then very easy for us to write reports that the client can access whenever they want, such as the numbers of orders in a month, total and average values, comparisons with the equivalent period in prior years and so on. This is incredibly valuable business information that’s easily available without recourse to us."

Growth beyond all expectations

And this added value has proved priceless to Coniston Corporate, as Paul confirms: "Although I can’t give an exact figure of a return on investment over the last two years, I can categorically say that in the improved efficiency of the business, error reduction, professional appearance and accurate accounting and reporting, the system has more than paid for itself," he declares.

"And Meantime has been an excellent company to work with at every stage – we have a very positive relationship. To be honest, I’m probably a bit of a nightmare client because I’m so specific in what I want, but Meantime has taken everything I asked for and turned it into a working system that I can quite honestly say has enabled our business to grow beyond all expectations"