Bakehouse: Delicious and determined

Bakehouse have gone from start-up to market leaders in 15 years. They are now firmly established as the UK's best and biggest supplier of Continental bake-off products. To keep their business fresh and their growth on track they've recently implemented Microsoft Business Solution Navision with the support of Columbus IT Partner (UK).

Bakehouse's mission is to make “exclusive food inclusive” and this mission has been the basis of a strong, sustained growth and the company is determined to continue growing.

“After many years with double-digit growth, Bakehouse was keen to invest in an integrated ERP that would accommodate the complexity of the business and provide a solid platform for future growth”, says project manager Felicity Jennings.

Tasty integration

Bakehouse are known for their crisp Continental Patisserie and melt-in-your-mouth Danish Pastries. They wanted an equally tasty, integrated ERP-solution and turned to Columbus IT Partner for assistance. The needs were analyzed and a set of criteria that the new solution should meet were defined: Integration of ledgers into a single, nominal ledger, improve stock management (at a third party warehouse) and stock visibility, better reporting through easily adaptable reporting tools, user defined screen views and EDI ordering, EDI delivery and EDI invoicing.

Huge success

“The implementation has been a huge success, delivered on time and in budget. This was in large part due to the hard work and commitment shown by Columbus IT Partner. The migration was quick and professional, processing down time was minimal and on the whole, the move was transparent for our business partners. We're still evaluating all the benefits associated with the move to MBS Navision and will be planning phase two in the coming months”, says Felicity Jennings.

Click of a button

By using the powerful financial functionality of Microsoft Business Solutions, Bakehouse can easily create and report on all required economical aspects. Stock management has also been greatly improved, which is especially important since Bakehouse rely on third party warehouses. Stock can now be analyzed and valued by a few clicks on the keyboard. The solution is also significantly more user friendly than the earlier system. After some training by Columbus IT Partner the Bakehouse staff are now able to create reports and screens that suit their immediate needs, putting them in control of the system and not the other way round.

“The training allowed us to personalize screens by functional team, thus ensuring greater user acceptance from the start”, says Felicity Jennings.

EDI links

Bakehouse stores products in a third-party warehouse and integrates movements in the actual warehouse with the back-end system. By using the power and flexibility of Microsoft Business Solutions Navision, EDI links have been created between the warehouse and Navision. They include EDI Order Creation where sales orders are sent directly from main customers to Bakehouse. Navision maintains an audit log so the users can see (on one screen) all sales order transactions and handle any problems that might arise. In the same workflow EDI files are sent to the warehouse where the staff can see which orders are in the pipeline and on which dates they are to be fulfilled. When the deliveries are made, a set of EDI files are returned to Microsoft Business Solutions Navision to be validated and logged in the audit log. Finally EDI invoices are created and forwarded to the relevant customers.

Simple, fast and effective

The EDI functionality has made business processing simple, fast and effective for the users. The visibility of information has enabled Bakehouse to see critical information quickly and easily which in turn makes their whole business more agile and better prepared to act on changing circumstances.