Director
Cater4You
Cater4You began in 2003 as a side business whilst the owner focused on his career of developing eCommerce websites. In 2007 a co-owner joined and started to grow the business from a shared warehouse space. The current Director began in 2007 and the company has grown from there, with three warehouse moves, a growing team and a revenue that's grown from £120,000 in the early days to over £4 million turnover this year.
Largely selling to coffee shops, bars, food producers and takeaways, Cater4You sell a wide variety of disposable containers. One customer bought containers to sell socks, another used their containers to breed spiders. From selling just plastic glasses to expanding to a full range of food packaging and home baking supplies, the opportunities for Cater4You have expanded and they now have a strong B2C and B2B audience.
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Cater4You puts its customers at the heart of its business and delivering quality customer service is paramount to its success.
It's Director states: "We're very much a customer service-focused company, the ethos at Cater4You is that we're a service company, we're not just a standard supplier. We provide a service that helps our customers keep their business running and we want to focus on supporting our customers and OGL Software helps us to deliver that good customer service."
Prior to OGL Software, Cater4You used Sage 50 and struggled to manage and control the volume of orders they received. "We move a lot of stock and there are a lot of transactional lines. We were still using Sage when we were doing two and a half million pounds turnover and the system couldn't handle that amount of data. If you can imagine, our average order value is around £100 and there is between 1 – 10 items per order so you can get the idea of how many transactional lines we create in just one year. Sage was slow and clunky, and it couldn't cope with the sheer volume.
"We needed a system that could handle the stock flow right from purchase to good inwards, sale, picking, packing, shipping, and invoice. The stock management in OGL Software has been key for us, the system works really well to allow us to manage our product movements and customer expectation."
Creating a streamlined and efficient order processing system, right from customer enquiry to the dispatching of goods, was important in ensuring the business was performing at optimum efficiency.
Implementing a new ERP system is a big move for any company and for Cater4You they needed to be confident that the system could manage their processes and help them deliver on their promises to their customers.
The Director explains: "We had a brief chat with a Sage 200 reseller but what we liked about OGL Software was that it was geared around stock. We had confidence from the consultation process that OGL Software could manage the way we buy and sell our stock. We use the kitting functionality within OGL Software to be able to sell in different units that we buy in from our suppliers. The conversations we had with the sales consultants gave us the confidence in the system. It was important for us to get our stock under control and that was key in moving to OGL Software."
Before implementing OGL Software, Cater4You struggled to keep their customers informed on stock availability, which meant they couldn't deliver the level of service they were striving for.
"Before OGL Software, sales order paperwork would go out to the warehouse, the team would go to pick the items and realise we didn't have the stock. We'd then have to wait for the paperwork to come back to the office, which could have been a couple of hours to the next day or after the weekend, and this is when we'd have to let the customer down.
"OGL Software has allowed us to manage customer expectations. We can instantly see if an item is out of stock and we can tell the customer from the beginning and offer alternatives, whether they'd prefer an alternative product, a part delivery or to wait for the next delivery date. The system allows us to avoid disappointment.
"Even in these unprecedented times we don't want to be letting our customers down. The demand for products during lockdown put a huge strain on the supply chain – in the first few months of the year our suppliers had done 6-9 months of stock already. This has been tricky for us, but the system has allowed us to manage that. Our website was extremely busy during lockdown but with the integration into OGL Software we were able to stay in control of our stock and still manage our customers expectations. We'd see products sell out in 3-4 hours and we've never seen products sell that quickly, but the system made us more efficient so we were able to cope with the sheer volume and be equipped to come into the office on Monday to send out over 500 orders."
OGL Software removes the manual tasks that require intense resources and automates processes to improve the overall performance of a business.
Cater4You has reaped the benefits of removing the manual processes that increased as they grew to a multi-million-pound turnover company. The Director explains: "OGL Software streamlines processes and where you streamline things you save time within the business. You need less staff, or you can redeploy staff in more productive ways. You can have people working on marketing instead of filing for example."
"The system makes us more efficient and if you can make peoples' lives easier within the business, you can get things done quicker, so customers are happier which breeds success. And we're still picking up enhancements that help us work more effectively, even after several years of being live.
"We adapted our existing processes to use the software to the best of its abilities and we're seeing massive benefits from doing that. Our software trainer said to us, "the more information you can put into the system, the more the software will work for you and the more you can get out of it" and I can still hear him saying that now. The system gives back if you use it correctly. With all our information in one place, it makes lives much easier."
Cater4You's Director reflects: "The move to a new software was big for us and it took some time to get used to the system, but you look back to where we were and it's revolutionary to see how far we've come. The software has enabled us to move forward."
OGL Software has become the digital core of Cater4You, helping to manage and control the volumes of stock movements and orders which ensures their customers return.
"My favourite things are those that have massively changed us from where we were and that relates to our stock management. We now can set minimum and maximum levels of stock so we can raise purchase orders from shortages to our optimum level. This gives us greater visibility of what's required on the shelf.
"Document scanning has been a massive time saver. Previously we'd keep a pile of paperwork three to four inches thick that we'd have to look through if someone had a query. People would spend time at the start of the day organising this. Now we scan the delivery document in and attach it to the customers record so we can help the customers almost instantly with queries. This saves us time to really work on the things we do best, which is customer service, rather than wading through paperwork and filing.
"The tele-order template in OGL Software works great for our sales team when re-ordering items for our customers. Customers have their own name for products which sometimes doesn't make sense to us, but with the order screen we can quickly view their order history to understand the products they've previously had. This visibility of information makes everyone's lives easier and the customers can have their orders placed in just 30 seconds over the phone. We can provide better customer service and the sales team can spend their time more productively.
"We've also integrated our carriers into the system to allow our guys to pick, pack, label and ship quickly. Before we had to sit down and book them through the courier websites which at one stage was nearly a full-time job. Now we can redeploy those staff members where they can contribute to bringing new business in."
OGL Software has helped to streamline processes in the sales office to the warehouse and purchasing. The Director continues: "We'd recommend OGL Software to other businesses. The support we were given through the implementation and the support we continue to receive is great. We were initially a bit dubious about the training sessions, but they were key for us to be confident on the system at go live, it was important for us to have training with the size of the software. It's great to know the software is still giving back to us.
"The advice I'd to give to companies who were in our position is you have to take a leap of faith. It was a big outlay and change for us but we're still seeing the benefits now and we're still finding ways the system can improve our efficiencies."
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