Retail and Hospitality

Costa Coffee streamlines business processes with Epicor

23 February 2008

Costa Coffee, a brand within the Whitbread Group PLC, has successfully completed a key phase of a major business engineering project, which uses Epicor Enterprise to help maintain strong growth within its corporate sales business.

The new capabilities are expected to help the business continue the double digit yearly growth rate of its roasting, sales and logistics business, which supplies coffee and a full range of branded signage, cups and merchandise to over 2,500 hotels, universities, hospitals, leisure centres, airlines, ships, pubs, bars and restaurants across the UK.

“Costa Coffee was originally founded on its National Accounts business and continues to grow alongside our retail group,” said Bob Wilde, head of systems for Costa Coffee. “As one of the oldest parts of our business, the National Accounts division has systems that have been home grown over a number of years. In 2006 we started a strategic project to look at ways to streamline and improve this business to enable us to keep up with the growing demand we are experiencing.

“It quickly became clear that Epicor Enterprise was the best system to achieve our goals,” continued Wilde. “But we needed to step back and make changes to our core processes around order processing and account management, as well as defining new key performance indicators (KPIs) for the business, in order to fully utilise the Enterprise solution.”

The upgrade to Epicor Enterprise version 7.3.6 began in late 2006 and introduced several new interface modifications, as well as more timely and actionable business intelligence. “We effectively removed a number of wasted steps in the order taking process, which has made it quicker and less prone to errors,” explained Wilde. “We also restructured the general ledger to improve searches and used the new business intelligence tools to create more meaningful reports to support debt management and produce our new KPIs.”

The last phase of optimisation and minor modifications based on user feedback is currently underway and due for completion over 2008. “Overall the project has been deemed a tremendous success,” concluded Wilde. “On the systems side, we are in a very solid position and our faith in Epicor has proven to be well founded, as we have a very strong platform to grow over the next few years.”