Epicor Enterprise helps Costa Coffee

Re-engineering of business processes to manage strong growth expectations  

Epicor Software Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise business software solutions for the midmarket and divisions of Global 1000 companies, has announced that Costa Coffee, a brand within the Whitbread Group PLC, has successfully completed a key phase of a major business engineering project which utilises Epicor Enterprise to help maintain strong growth within its Corporate Sales Business.

The new capabilities are expected to help the business continue the double digit yearly growth rate of its roasting, sales and logistics business, which supplies coffee and a full range of branded signage, cups and merchandise to over 2,500 hotels, universities, hospitals, leisure centres, airlines, ships, pubs, bars and restaurants across the UK.

Costa Coffee was originally founded on its National Accounts business and continues to grow alongside our retail group, explained Bob Wilde, Head of Systems for Costa Coffee.  As one of the oldest parts of our business, the National Accounts division has systems that have been home grown over a number of years. In 2006 we started a strategic project to look at ways to streamline and improve this business to enable us to keep up with the growing demand we are experiencingespecially from hotel and leisure and large enterprise customers.

We have been an Epicor Enterprise customer for a number of years and the first phase of the project was to look at our requirements and evaluate whether Enterprise was suitable to the task, Wilde said.  It quickly became clear that Epicor Enterprise was the best system to achieve our goals, but we needed to step back and make changes to our core processes around order processing and account management, as well as defining new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the business, in order to fully utilise the Enterprise solution.

The upgrade to Epicor Enterprise version 7.3.6 began in late 2006 and introduced several new interface modifications, as well as more timely and actionable business intelligence.  We effectively removed a number of wasted steps in the order taking process, which has made it quicker and less prone to errors, explained Wilde. We also restructured the general ledger to improve searches and used the new business intelligence tools to create more meaningful reports to support debt management and produce our new KPIs.

Wilde looks at the upgrade as essential in the context of the sector, The business is on course to double over the next few years and to meet that demand we need the latest in systems that fit our specific purpose while offering upgradeability in key areas.

One such area is electronic communication and customer interaction. One of our very large local government accounts requires us to deliver connectivity via EDI.  Enterprise 7.3.6 will enable us to provide this to them, as well as to an increasing number of other corporate customers who recognize the value of reducing transaction processing cost with suppliers, Wilde added.

The last phase of optimization and minor modifications based on user feedback is currently underway and due for completion over 2008.  Overall the project has been deemed a tremendous success, commented Wilde.  On the systems side, we are in a very solid position and our faith in Epicor has proven to be well founded, as we have a very strong platform to grow over the next few years.

About Epicor Software Corporation

Epicor is a global leader dedicated to providing integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) and professional services automation (PSA) software solutions to the midmarket and divisions of Global 1000 companies.  Founded in 1984, Epicor serves over 20,000 customers in more than 140 countries, providing solutions in over 30 languages.  Employing innovative service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services technology, Epicor delivers end-to-end, industry-specific solutions for manufacturing, distribution, retail, hospitality and services that enable companies to drive increased efficiency, improve performance and build competitive advantage.  Epicor solutions provide the scalability and flexibility to meet today's business challenges, while empowering enterprises for even greater success tomorrow.  Epicor offers a comprehensive range of services with its solutions, providing a single point of accountability to promote rapid return on investment and low total cost of ownership.  Epicors worldwide headquarters are located in Irvine, California with offices and affiliates around the world.