User Story: Coffee Republic
Instant Results for Coffee Republic: Infor PM10 puts the beans back in the Coffee Business
The Client
Coffee Republic is an AIM listed company currently operating over 60 specialty espresso bars and delis throughout the UK
The Challenge
When the project started Coffee Republic operated over 100 bars throughout the UK. They have SUN Systems financials and produced all of their Management Reports,
Forecasts and Budgets using Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets. Graham Norton their Systems Accountant and Marketing Analyst, produced all of the reports by skillful manipulation of a 10,000 line spreadsheet.
“Much as anything I felt that the company was far too reliant on my Excel skills and needed a solution that they could own and run themselves.” Said Graham.
“We also needed to have a much more flexible approach to forecasting and reporting as the company has to have visibility of its key numbers accurately and early and be able to test the impact of different scenarios, especially when considering bar closures, openings and refurbishment.”
The Approach
Coffee Republic was introduced to multidimensional analysis over a year before eventually embarking on a development of a solution. We started with the production of the actual management accounts with data coming from SUN Systems. Within a day the Infor PM10 cubes were built and populated with 12 months of SUN data and a first cut of the management accounts was produced.
In the Coffee business waste is not specifically measured so an accounting reconciliation is developed to calculate this. This was delivered using Infor PM10’s Business Rules Engine along side all of the other Business Logic which was required to generate reconciled Management Accounts.
The next development area was the Operational Forecast which flowed into the Budget and then into a reforecast.
The intitial solution has been built using a single copy of Infor PM10 and with 10 operational Managers a reliable method of providing base data from the system and collecting forecast data was required.
This was achieved using Infor PM10 database formulae in spreadsheet templates. As soon as an ops manager completed their forecast this was sent to Graham. All he had to do was to open it up, press F9, which updated the database and the P&L effect was calculated immediately.
Based on this forecast the company’s budget was produced. Many of the cost lines were entered as total year amounts and the Business logic within Infor PM10 was used to spread the figures monthly.
Particularly impressive, according to Norton, was the way Infor PM10 handles the different time frames. The Ops forecast is done based on weekly sales and margins and the P&L is monthly. Infor PM10 had no problem linking the right weeks to period
The Result
Since the Management Accounts were produced Infor PM10’s multi-dimensional database has allowed Coffee Republic to analyse the numbers by groups of bars, by account and by period, with comparison against Budget and forecast, just by slicing out a new view of the data.
Because Infor PM10 is a real-time multi-dimensional solution, the company’s management can now immediately see the effects of changing anything from a rent review date or a bar closure date to a percentage increase in sales across the whole company.
The Infor PM10 solution just makes the whole company more confident about its decision making process as the numbers are more immediately available.
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"Our ability to analyse data has been enhanced beyond belief. I can't imagine going back to spreadsheets"
G Norton, Coffee Republic