Bakery supplies distributor Bako UK expects to save tens
of thousands of pounds a year by introducingmanagement information softwaretocollate purchasing informationacross
the organisation.
The group of six independent regional companies, with a combined
annual turnover of £140m, expects a return on investment in less
than a year.
Bako was losing interest on hundreds of thousands of pounds in
trade discounts because it had to wait up to 12 months to generate
reports to check suppliers' calculations of their discount
entitlements.
It was costing about £30,000 a year in labour to keep track of
purchasing information stored in ERP systems using different
supplier codes and product descriptions in each of the group's
companies.
David Ferguson, Bako's IT services manager, said, "We have long
been looking for a way of bringing information from the various
information systems across the group into a single application, but
had been unable to find software with enough flexibility at a
reasonable price."
In January 2008, Bako introduced Management Information
Dashboard software from
Solarsoft to enable it to
calculate and cross-reference trade discounts with suppliers
instantly.
Ferguson said the software was "lightning fast" because all data
was held in memory and did not require hundreds of calls to a
database, like many other similar tools.
"By collating information from all the systems across the group
into a single application, we can now analyse our purchasing data
in many different ways, easily identify trends, and get an overall
picture of the group's performance for the first time," he
added.