The Company

British Founded in 1992, Elizabeth French is an importer and wholesale distributor of a range of branded cosmetics and toiletries, supplying retailers and distributors in the UK and overseas from its premises in the North-West of England. Elizabeth French sources products from independent suppliers, mostly in the Far East and distributes them to a variety of customers. In addition, they operate their own assembly and packing lines at their Warrington factory.

Challenge

Elizabeth French created their first all-in-one system to manage their business processes using DataEase for DOS. With the expansion of their company and the need to update to the latest Windows software, they decided to convert their complex and mission critical application to NetPlus. This involved re-writing the original application into a more streamlined system and developing conversion routines to transfer the data into the new system.

Solution

Sapphire was commissioned to undertake the development of the NetPlus system. Due to the critical status of their application, which handled all of their business' processes - from initial sales to final delivery - Sapphire had to rewrite every module of the new application which had to go live all at the same time. During the development a number of problems and loopholes in the original DOS application were identified and addressed and new functionality added. The data was also cleaned as it was being ported to SQL Server 2000. NetPlus was chosen as it allowed Sapphire to implement the complex business rules needed to manage the workflow whilst still maintaining the flexible approach to development that is associated with the DataEase family of products.

The outcome

Sapphire created a new system that was optimised to Elizabeth French's current business workflow. This dealt with purchasing, sales orders, sales order processing, control of picking notes for warehouse and production, control of despatch and invoicing, posting of all financial transactions to Sun Accounts, stock take and several other areas including administration.

Elizabeth French's users, which include most employees in the company, can now report on data far more comprehensively than before and no longer need to manually input information across each area, a job which is handled by barcode readers that receive regular updated data.

The finished system has given Elizabeth French more control over their business, enabling their users to access information about any particular aspect of their workflow quickly and easily.

Currently Sapphire has been asked to create further enhancements to their stock take module.