Jim Garrahy’s Fudge Kitchen
This company has 8 Fudge Shops based around the UK with a central administrative office at a separate location in East Kent. The business had a great deal of paperwork needing to be filled in by each shop on a monthly basis, which was both time consuming and also resulted in high costs relating to communicating this information by fax/mail/phone. The main office already had computer infrastructure in place and was equipped with an ASDL connection with a fixed IP address, but the company needed to make better use of the ICT opportunities available in the marketplace to grow and develop their business further.
This company benefited in number of ways; the majority of advice given was on a one-to-one basis, primarily due to the complex in-depth nature of the ICT projects. However this client also attended at least one event run by the project, it was at this event that this particular client was able to meet with some of the key ICT companies in the county to identify private sector suppliers that would be able to deliver services needed by the company.
Through these interventions, Jim’s Garrahy’s Fudge Kitchen developed better electronic communication between the shops and the office. Initially, they were advised to deploy PCs at each of the shop locations and create a virtual private network (VPN) between the office and each of the shops. This VPN would allow webcams to be installed, allowing the shops to see each other and to see the office. Furthermore, the company were advised on the installation of computer hardware, wi-fi, remote access, ADSL and data capture/collation.
The benefits of the ICT intervention have positively affected the company in many ways which have contributed to the last financial year being the most profitable yet since the business was started 21 years ago. Firstly the deployment of the Intranet significantly reduced conventional communication costs (fax, phone and snail-mail); the intranet was launched all the shops so they were able to see how each other was performing which introduced a friendly competitive environment that has contributed to higher sales - this has also resulted in the entire organisation feeling more like a complete team with the real-time live video and chat facilities.
Peter Parson
e-mail:
www.technologyenterprise.co.uk
