When investing in I.T, a burning question posed by any business manager, director or owner is ‘will it be worth the investment?’
To help answer that question, we at One Degree Consulting ltd, would refer you to real and actual savings made by our customers. It is almost a year since Advance Music Ltd implemented workFile EPOS, making their case the ideal platform to answer any questions from.
Colin Freeman, director of Advance Music says, “There is absolutely no doubt workFile has saved us money. In our case it has saved us a full time member of staff.”
The diagram shows the efficiency gains of workFile EPOS compared to a typical EPOS solution, and manual based solutions. The information shown is based on the experience of Advance Music ltd. The blue blocks show the daily efficiency gains of both a typical EPOS system and workFile EPOS compared to a manual process (shown on the right). You can also see the daily gains made using workFile EPOS compared to standard EPOS solutions. The purple blocks shows the efficiency in Man Days gained over a week. Here you can see the vast efficiency gains of workFile EPOS. Efficiency gains may vary due to volume, demand and internal processes.
In August 2005 Advance Music Ltd, chose workFile to be their replacement solution to their current EPOS implementation. “One of the benefits of choosing workFile EPOS was its ability to use our existing till hardware, this was an instant saving for us as we didn’t have to make a further investment, unlike most other EPOS solutions we looked at,” says Colin.
It was important that workFile was flexible enough to deal with the Music industry retail requirements, but it was equally important that technical and business staff grasped the concepts of the industry. “I am very impressed, right from the start, how quickly One Degree were able to grasp our business, concepts and ideas,” explains Colin.
Staff training days were provided as part of the cost of the system along with a ‘hand-holding’ period once the system went live. This enabled staff at Advance Music ltd to quickly gain confidence in using the system in the real world, in the live environment.
It was apparent within its first week of implementation that workFile EPOS was helping staff carry out their work more efficiently. Shop stock control, order identification and generation were the first main areas to show vast productivity gains. Colin explains that “what used to take us 2 man days with our old EPOS system now takes us less than half a man day.” This massive amount of time saved allowed staff members to concentrate on higher valued tasks, such as dealing with customers on the shop floor.
In addition to order generation and placement, massive savings were soon found in taking deliveries and also when generating back orders or new orders for stock that was not supplied. “With back orders we used to have to check what we had received against what we had ordered. Then create an order for the items placed on back order. This could take up to 4 hours for larger deliveries, however, with workFile its one click and we are done, its a matter of seconds,” says Colin.
The longer the workFile EPOS system was used, the more savings were identified within the business. Vast efficiency gains were made in many areas including, till transactions, customer orders, hire processing, repairs, quotations, customer service and invoice generation to name a few.
With almost a year passed Advance Music Ltd are looking to further leverage workFile EPOS by utilising its eCommerce capabilities. By the end of August 2006, Advance Music Ltd hope to have a full eCommerce solution providing the shop with a new sales outlet, the internet. The internet web site will be run and maintained by the workFile EPOS solution, providing Advance Music with additional sales streams without the need for any additional administration.
A year with workFile EPOS has enabled Advance Music Ltd to operate their business with just 3 full time members of staff providing them with savings annually of over £20,000. This meant that Advance Music Ltd return on investment was met in less than 6 months of purchasing and leveraging workFile EPOS. So, to answer that burning question, “will it be worth the investment?” the answer is most definitely yes.