Costa Coffee migration optimises supply chain

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Costa Coffee, part of the Whitbread Group, has completed a key phase of a major business process re-engineering project to help maintain strong growth within its corporate sales business.

Bob Wilde, Costa Coffee's head of systems, said that as one of the oldest parts of its business, the national accounts division has relied on homegrown systems 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 - especially from hotel and leisure and large enterprise customers."

The company has gained new capabilities through its upgrade and re-engineering work that are expected to help its national accounts 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 UK outlets.

The company is a long-standing customer of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software provider Epicor in other areas of the business. Wilde said the business decided to extend its system functionality to meet the strategic needs of the national accounts division.

"The business is on course to double over the next few years and to meet that demand we need the latest in systems that fit our specific purpose while offering upgradeability in key areas," Wilde said.

Costa's upgrade to Epicor Enterprise version 7.3.6, with new interface modifications, began in late 2006. "We effectively removed a number of wasted steps in the order taking process, which has made it quicker and less prone to errors," added Wilde.

"We also restructured the general ledger to improve searches and used the new business intelligence [BI] tools to create more meaningful reports to support debt management and produce our new KPIs [key performance indicators]," he said.

The upgrade is also providing new electronic communication and customer interaction functionality. "One of our very large local government accounts requires us to deliver connectivity via EDI [electronic data interchange]," added Wilde. "Enterprise 7.3.6 will enable us to provide this to them, as well as to an increasing number of other corporate customers who recognise the value of reducing transaction processing cost with suppliers."

The company is now in the final optimisation phase, which includes modifications based on user feedback and is due for completion later this year. "We have a very strong platform to grow over the next few years," said Wilde.

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