SOHO Coffee Co. is an independent, privately owned business determined to grow through good reputation with its customers and partners alike. The company prides itself on great service and excellent food and coffee above all and it feels strongly that in today's tough and competitive environment it is their customers who are the most important asset.
When it became apparent that the back office reporting and analysis system in use at SOHO Coffee Co. was no longer able to provide the information required to manage its growing estate of stores, the Cheltenham-based company asked its IT services company, Converge Technology Ltd. to source a reliable, new system.
The system - like its predecessor - had to be touch-screen based and able to be used as both a front-of-house and a head office reporting and control system. Ideally, it needed to be cloud-based, offering access and control from a browser running on a smart phone or tablet.
Converge Technology contacted Consolis Systems and arranged for a demonstration of its cloud-based head office information system, Inno on Demand.
With 10 stores directly-owned by SOHO Coffee Co. and some 27 tills in total, the company required real-time information across the estate without having to take any tills out of service to retrieve historical data. They particularly needed real-time data on till sales, profits, margins, wastage, best sellers and stock movement across the product suite and estate of restaurants to ensure that the business was being continually monitored and optimised.
Peter Manuel, operations manager at SOHO Coffee, comments: "Consolis engineers arrived on site at the end of March 2015, ready to install the Inno on Demand system carrying only a USB stick. The data transfer took place both quickly and seamlessly, and our operators sat in on demos - we were then up and running by early April. It was a seamless transition, and there was nothing that prevented us processing transactions.
"Since the system went live, we haven't experienced any downtime at any of our sites - the stability is phenomenal. And now we have access to all reporting information - at our fingertips. We can now dig deeper into our sales data."
In practice, the new product offered considerably more flexibility and functionality as well as being a more resilient, efficient and swifter product than the predecessor due to the design and programming techniques used.
However, another major plus for SOHO Coffee Co. users was that the graphical user interface, (GUI) looked similar to the old system and was quickly able to be used with confidence by the management team. In particular, the simple graphical user interface, till maintenance, the search functions and reporting capabilities of Inno on Demand including till sales, stock sales and archived history made it an instant success.
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