The Office Coffee Company scales B2B operations with Brightpearl

The background

The Office Coffee Company partners with the charity, Cool Earth, to provide businesses with quality and ethically-sourced tea and coffee, as well as coffee machines. They moved to Brightpearl when they realized that their previous software setup was too fraught with manual processes, risks of error and duplicate data entry to allow them to grow. The switch was a huge success allowing them to scale their operations.

The Office Coffee Company are determined to become the number one supplier of choice for office coffee machines providing quality, ethically-sourced tea and coffee. Hoping to turn the nation’s office coffee drinkers into rainforest rescuers, they’ve partnered up with a charity called Cool Earth. This charity helps to combat climate change by helping local people to reassert control over their own environments and stop logging, saving homes and habitats by protecting one of the most beautiful places on earth.

We caught up with Managing Director at The Office Coffee Company, Richard Doherty, to find out how they are using Brightpearl to help them complete this mission and why they call Brightpearl: “The best business decision we’ve ever made.”

The challenge

Richard begins by telling us: “In order to achieve our goals, we need to provide an outstanding service for our customers, saving them time and money. We have multiple revenue streams and we’re selling across multiple channels so this is no easy feat. We’ve got new businesses taking up our services every day and we sell a lot of our products online and over the phone as well – it’s a lot to handle. We realized that if we were going to maintain the level of customer service that we had attained and still grow our business, we were going to need a robust piece of software that could take us to the next level.”

Prior to Brightpearl, Richard says: “We were reliant on too many manual processes. The previous set up we were using utilized Sage Accounts and ACT to perform all our CRM, inventory control, purchasing, order fulfillment and accounting. Plus, in order to allow the business to focus on growth, we were outsourcing all of our financial administration too. We were reliant on so many manual processes on each system that it was costing us a lot of money, while the risk of error was far too great. Not to mention the cost of outsourcing our finances.”

“The other major challenge we were facing was data integrity with the CRM system’s synchronization with our server causing us to lose data, which is more than just the time and effort lost, but potential future business too,” continues Richard.

Key Challenges:

• Unnecessary manual processes

• High risk of error

• Loss of critical business data

The solution

“We thought switching systems would be a real headache, and whilst we knew that our processes at the time were not scalable and fraught with risk of error, we would not be able to commit the time to change for at least 12 months. That was until our web developer suggested Brightpearl. Moving over was easier than expected and we were up and running in next to no time,” Richard tells us.

Once Brightpearl was fully implemented, the benefits that The Office Coffee Company experienced came thick and fast. “Brightpearl linked everything together. No more duplication of effort, reduced risk of errors and much less manual processes. We could see the value of an integrated system straightaway and were really impressed with how the platform could adapt to our business. It’s cloud-based too so I can trust it – no more risky synchronizations with our server. I can now be confident I’m seeing how my business is running on an hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute basis – wherever I am in the country.”

Richard continues: “My CRM, inventory and order processing feeding instantly into my accounts has made life so much easier. Balancing my books is no longer a big deal. In fact, it is now so simple to get an accurate and up-to-date set of accounts that I don’t have to outsource our financial administration any more. That’s a big saving. We’ve also got automated invoicing set up, as the order management system and CRM are fully in sync, so our customers are reminded of their payments automatically, meaning we never miss out on a sale. We have total visibility over who has paid and how much in just a few clicks.”

The future

Looking ahead to the future, Richard tells us: “Brightpearl has made my business incredibly efficient. We are no longer reliant on information a phone call or email away. Brightpearl allows my team to see the information they need to provide outstanding service whilst at the same time reducing costs and saving time. Since implementing the software, we save four thousand pounds a month – that’s almost £50k a year. Brightpearl is definitely the best business decision we’ve ever made. I look forward to seeing The Office Coffee Company grow whilst producing high quality and ethically-sourced tea and coffee for our customers.”

www.office-coffee.co.uk