How investing in computer hardware benefited my business

Analyse the business' needs"I believed there were ways we could improve our customer relations, supplier management and stock control by introducing electronic systems. All our information was paper-based or in our directors' heads. We did a lot of investigation work, making sure we understood how Tile Mart works, what our suppliers wanted and what our customers needed, and used that to set out our overall objectives."

Make use of the advice and support available"We got our local Business Link involved quite early on. While it was easy for us to generate the ideas - such as unifying our stock control and ordering processes - turning them into a real system can be difficult. Our adviser worked very hard for us, suggesting practical approaches to introduce our IT hardware and systems. And he introduced us to Preston Business Venture and the Asian Business Federation, which helped us with grants for equipment."

Introduce IT systems progressively"Previously we had one PC sitting in a corner, hardly used. Now we've got four networked PCs, a printer that we use for statements, invoices and promotional material and a laptop that our sales team can use on the road. While our overall objective was large - to use and share all our company data effectively - we broke it down into small parts. Our accounting systems were first and we bought an off-the-shelf software system, which helped us manage credit control more effectively and allowed us to raise invoices in a matter of minutes.


"Then we converted the purchase ledger system. The reports from the software package helped us to accurately analyse our ordering and boost our cashflow through smarter stockholding. We've got internal and external email now too, which makes communication between our three sites faster and more reliable."Our next project is to introduce a stock control and point-of-sale system to make it easier to share stock across the branches and improve availability for customers.""We devised a stock-code system that we thought would save time when inputting product details to the software. However, after six months we realised that it just wasn't going to work as it stood, so we scrapped it."