Integrated ERP is right tool for the job at Caldwells

It comes at a time of rapid growth, for the company, which has grown from £3 million to £5.5 million since moving from wholesale distribution to direct sales in 2003. Managing director Andrew Caldwell, the seventh generation of Caldwells to run the business, says: “Access Supply Chain will give us much greater control over the business and will help us improve customer service levels. It will remove the need for all our various subsystems and spreadsheets and integrate everything so the same information is visible to everybody.” Caldwells sells to blue-chip merchants, such as Screw Fix and Wickes, which in turn, sell to the building, gardening and fencing trades. The company has more than 1,500 SKUs and, although much of its product range is manufactured at its own factory, also now imports some products and components from the Far East. “It’s all about customer service and making sure you’ve got the right stock. If you get it wrong, you can be out of stock for six to seven weeks. Access Supply Chain will help make sure that when a distributor orders something, it will be on their shelves within a couple of days,” says Caldwell. And he adds: “I like the modular nature of the software; there’s lots of functionality you can add at a later date, like CRM and barcoding for the warehouse. You don’t need to do it all at once; you can take it in bite-size chunks.” He says that probably the greatest immediate benefit of the system is the hardest to quantify at this stage. “Winning new customers is one thing but if you don’t deliver a certain level of service, you can’t expect to keep the business; there’s an almost intangible benefit from the software because we expect to see an upswing in orders just because we will be able to handle them better and provide better stock levels.”