Blue Autumn Limited designs, manufactures, distributes and supports a range of work-wear for the health and catering sectors. Headquartered in Newtownards, Northern Ireland, the Company provides healthcare, industrial and leisure clothing to private nursing homes and health authorities across the UK. Formed in 1997, over the last eight years Blue Autumn has established a consistent reputation for quality, stylish work-wear, which is manufactured to last and to continually stay smart.
The following case study outlines some of the challenges the company faced before working with Internet Power Systems and what we did about them!
The Company is the prime supplier of work-wear to Four Seasons Healthcare, the largest independent supplier of healthcare services in the UK who operate 440 care centres and employs over 21,000 people, the majority of whom require work and leisure clothing. Blue Autumn generates a similar level of business from private and public sector care centres across the UK and Republic of Ireland. In order to maintain its reputation for quality, hard-wearing garments Blue Autumn directly manages its core processes - sales, distribution, manufacturing and customer support. The last area is particularly key to business growth and stability, by maintaining close relationships with its diverse customer base, Blue Autumn can continually measure the usage and quality of its clothing as well as responding rapidly to changing demands.
Today, the Company delivers over 5,000 items of work-wear per month, the majority of which are manufactured to order. Newtownards is the traditional centre for textile manufacture in Northern Ireland, but Blue Autumn's core production centre has been recently transferred to Iasi in North East Romania. Like Newtownards, Iasi is the Romanian equivalent for textile design and manufacture, with an established faculty of textiles at the University of Iasi, a Textiles Commission with several hundred member companies, plus a permanent Trade Centre.
The Blue Autumn plant in Iasi is a wholly-owned subsidiary employing 40 staff covering design, production, quality control and local administration. The normal order-delivery cycle is two weeks with shipments trucked weekly (by TNT) from Iasi to Newtownards, which are then distributed across the UK. Urgent orders can be satisfied in 48 hours by using scheduled flights from Romania into Belfast.
The new business model has significantly reduced the unit cost per garment. Equally important, the quality of work-wear is maintained through the long term investment in the textile industry throughout Iasi. Also, there are sufficient local skilled labour and production facilities to satisfy both planned and unexpected changes in demand.
A major concern and difficulty facing Blue Autumn was the potential cost and complexity of the IT infrastructure to support both the Iasi and Newtownards facilities. Also, the demand to implement the best IT solution for the business outweighed the considerable investment in Sage software applications, which were increasingly unable to meet the challenges of the new Blue Autumn operating model. The options were to replicate Sage systems in both locations, with all the associated operational, data and technical problems of maintaining parallel systems in remote locations, or to adopt a more radical, but centralised approach to IT. Following in-depth analysis of the available technologies, Blue Autumn opted for i-Tr@der, a centralised, internet-based solution that can service both locations and be available to management and staff when at work, home or on the move. The concept of remotely hosted business solutions with no applications resident on the desktop, allows the computing resource to fully support the business but with minimum overhead, investment or risk.
From a design perspective, the i-Tr@der software offers several operational benefits.
For both locations, the core business applications are available on demand, with a single up-to-date database of information provided to all users. Electronic communications are immediate and not reliant on external service providers. The complete IT infrastructure is automatically backed up using parallel systems housed in a secure, purpose-built London centre. From a business perspective, costs were minimised as there was no demand for duplicate server and software in Romania. The implementation at both locations, including data conversion and staff training for the initial modules, was completed in just six weeks.
However, the main benefits stem from the functionality of i-Tr@der to underpin Blue Autumn's business processes.
The product catalogue is available on-line, allowing orders to be placed and acknowledged by both staff and customers. Orders can be seamlessly processed through to despatch and automatic invoicing, without any re-keying or transfer of data. Stock and production levels are immediately available, including those finished goods in transit. Purchase orders can be raised in either Newtownards or Iasi with full control over deliveries and payments. In summary, i-Tr@der allows Blue Autumn to operate more flexibly from both locations, with far less focus and investment on IT technology.
This, coupled with on-line access to up-to-date information provides management more time and resources to establish new customers and grow the business.These factors combine to improve customer service and protect income levels.
The working relationship between Blue Autumn and IPS and i-Tr@der has benefited both companies. Blue Autumn was provided with a first-class service during early deployment and usage of new software applications. In return i-Tr@der has benefited from the commercial expertise and feed back from management and staff. Six months into the IT project, the core business processes are now totally managed by i-Tr@der.
Five applications are operational
- Customer Management
- Diaries
- Sales Order Processing with Sales Ledger
- Purchase Order Processing with Purchase Ledger and
- Stock Control.
Blue Autumn is also investigating the Job Costing module for tighter control of expenditure across different areas of operation. All the main business administration functions are now managed in Romania, thereby lowering the operational cost-base of the company. Significantly, greater control over the Company's computing resources is now possible. The ability to restrict functions such as e-mail sending to only bona-fide company contacts held within the Customer Management module eliminates unauthorised use of e-mail, with the consequential reduction of risk from spam and virus infection.
The implementation of i-Tr@der has resulted in Blue Autumn achieving a number of key business objectives. Management and staff can view the same up-to-date data irrespective of location. Previously this was a tedious, time-consuming operation to merge disparate data sets.
Blue Autumn is satisfied with the success of the system, to-date. While the concept of a managed hosted IT service was not well known or understood by management, the lower costs of deploying and running i-Tr@der have been fully realised and the flexibility to support growth and change remain attractive options. Most importantly, i-Tr@der has simplified the use of computing in the business finally removing the shackles inherent with traditional IT solutions. The management team now has the freedom to focus on improving the performance of the business.
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