Elizabeth Shaw, a luxury provider of chocolate-based confectionery, has gone live with an ERP solution from Advanced Exchequer (Exchequer) to drive cost efficiencies and support its growth strategy of diversifying its product portfolio.
Exchequer’s solution, which includes integrated stock forecasting, sales order processing and electronic data interchange (EDI) functionality, will enable Elizabeth Shaw to streamline management reporting around its sales performance and improve cash flow.
Exchequer has replaced cumbersome reporting processes which involved manually extracting and re-formatting large volumes of financial data in Excel before it could be interpreted. Management reports such as sales performance against target, order intake by customer and manufacturing forecasts can now be generated in seconds to improve productivity and decision making.
David Boulton, Finance and Operations Controller at Elizabeth Shaw explains: “The business has changed and our previous system was outdated and didn’t evolve with us. We needed a contemporary ERP solution with stronger and more user-friendly reporting capabilities to better support our plans for growth.”
Exchequer won the contract following a competitive tendering process, involving five other software providers.
“We selected Exchequer because it was by far the best fit and offers us real integration. The solution’s ease of reporting will allow us to develop richer, more relevant business information and the annual cost to run it is substantially lower than the annual cost of our previous system.”
The solution’s stock forecasting functionality is assisting Elizabeth Shaw to efficiently forecast stock requirements based on sales history trends, customer schedules and anticipated seasonal demand relating to its 40 product lines. By gaining faster access to stock and sales information the company can more accurately forecast its manufacturing requirements to improve production planning and collaboration with suppliers.
Furthermore, the integration between Exchequer’s stock control and sales order modules has improved the processing of over 250 sales orders Elizabeth Shaw receives each month. Sales orders are submitted in a standard format using EDI links before being converted into invoices and processed in Exchequer, reducing administration time and costs by providing a paperless exchange.
Boulton comments: “Exchequer’s intuitive reporting is giving us consistent information and faster access to reliable data on product and sales trends. It is enabling us to maintain better control over our stock levels and cash flow and supports more effective decision-making which is vital as we expand our product range.
“Being able to efficiently track sales orders is giving us improved visibility of our overall performance. Exchequer also offers us the added flexibility of being able to move to the cloud when the business is ready which will not restrict our processing capabilities if we fulfil our growth aspirations.”
Exchequer is part of Advanced Business Solutions, an Advanced Computer Software Group company.