CSY EPOS News: Garden Centre weeds out administrative waste

It has long been the case that price, product quality and excellent customer service have been the three critical success factors for those operating within the Garden Centre industry but, in a extremely competitive and maturing marketplace, Garden Centres are finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate their offerings to the customer. In response to this, Armitages has taken the innovative approach of automating its back office activities, through TaskCentre®, with the aim of creating new front end competitive advantages.

David Whitwam, IT Manager for Armitages explained the impact TaskCentre® is having on the company,”Our industry as a whole is very customer-centric but very few competitive gains are left to be achieved from this approach. As a result, we decided to systematically automate our back-office activities through the use of TaskCentre®.” He continued, “The commercial savings we have achieved through the intelligent automation of our administrative tasks have been significant and the effect on our front end competitive performance is transparent to all within the company.”

Philip Smith, Managing Director for Orbis Software, also commented on the success Armitages has achieved through TaskCentre®, “In a fast moving B2C environment, such as the garden centre industry, successful companies work smarter than their competitors”. He continued, “Armitages is such a company, as it has saved a considerable amount of time and money by automating those employee business processes that many organisations continue to assign people to conduct.”

Armitages Garden Centres is the first company in their industry to embrace Business Process Management technology and it is expected that other companies within this highly competitive sector will quickly follow suit.