axis diplomat Case Study

Winterstoke Decorators Supply Limited

Winterstoke Decorators Supply is a major independent stockist of paints and other decorators supplies. The family run business prides itself on personal service and its ability to supply from a huge range of stock from manufacturers such as ICI Dulux, Crown and Berger. The business combines retail sales from its own shop and wholesale supply to independent decorators shops and contractors. axis diplomat point of sale software is deployed on three screens on the shop counter giving staff immediate access to enter sales (normally using bar-code reader technology). Sales can be entered onto a client's account or processed as a cash sale and either a full trade invoice or retail "till" receipt produced as appropriate. For cash sales the software is linked to cash drawers and provides cashing-up reports and other till analysis. Stock levels are updated in real-time as sales transactions are entered.

Debra Bowe, Company Secretary of Winterstoke Decorators, said "We have been a customer of axisfirst for many years. Their knowledge of our business, together with the fast and efficient manner in which they deal with our IT needs, ensures that our business runs smoothly and efficiently."

axis diplomat handles the complex demands of the business for differential pricing when handling a mix of trade and retail clients including special pricing agreed on an individual customer basis.

An individual customer's own pricing is retrieved automatically whether at the shop counter point-of-sale and within backoffice order processing.

On many of the trade accounts the Goods on Account module is utilised to automatically consolidate the numerous small purchases made each week onto a single account invoice.

This is a key facility in significantly reducing the administrative burden of processing high volumes of relatively low value transactions both for Winterstoke Decorator Supplies and their customers.

A number of vans provide a daily delivery service for orders arriving by fax, telephone and email. Orders are entered into the axis diplomat Sales Order Processing module and picked from documents produced by the system in bin number sequence.

Deliveries are then checked onto the vans using bar-code scanning technology to check items against the customer's order helping ensure that any errors are minimised.

The large number of transactions processed means that backing up data is vitally important. Recognising this, the company backs up its axis diplomat data overnight, every night, using facilities built into the software.

As a part of its disaster recovery planning the company also backs up off-site by subscribing to the axisfirst Safe off-site Storage (SoS) service, which automates the process of transfering highly compressed data over an Internet connection to axisfirst servers.

Please visit the Winterstoke Decorators website at http://www.winterstokedecorators.co.uk/