Brick Kiln Garden Centre cuts spend by 10% and ordering time by 75% with PLANERGY
- Company Overview
Brick Kiln is a garden center and restaurant located in West Sussex, UK. In addition, they offer pet food and supplies, and pool supplies. Offering the best prices, best coffee, and best buzz locally.
- Why PLANERGY
PLANERGY was in use at their sister landscaping company and had such a positive impact they wanted to start using it at Brick Kiln Garden Centre to start seeing similar benefits.
Key Challenges
- No automated procurement system in place
- Purchasing process consisted of manual paperwork with spreadsheets and email resulting in spending
- Too much time spent on ordering and missed orders
- Reps could come in and place duplicate orders, resulting in too much unnecessary inventory
- No ability to analyse spend
- Invoice processing taking up half of the finance team’s time
Key Benefits
- Digitizing the entire ordering process saved 75% of the time spent on ordering from vendors
- Saving more than 10% of their spend through better spend management
- Order visibility across the company stopped duplicate orders with significant savings realized
- Single source of truth for spend with all information and documents searchable and reportable
- Invoice processing and approval time greatly reduced by easy matching against the verified PO and delivery information
The Story
Customer
Garden Centre and Restaurant
Key client
Owner
Industry
Retail
Company Size
20+ employees
Before PLANERGY
Before using PLANERGY, Brick Kiln Garden Centre relied on handwritten orders and a fax machine. In the manual paper-based approach, there was lost paperwork, with entire workdays dedicated to raising orders with suppliers. They kept information in a variety of formats and places and documents could often go missing.
Some supplier orders had as many as 300 line items, all of which needed to be inputted manually, leaving plenty of room for error. Ordering direct from reps without visibility of previous orders from other suppliers often resulted in ordering duplicate items, wasted spend, and overstock. “Sometimes I would have plant labels coming out my ears!” recalls Laura Van Der Wee, owner and manager.
Once the order was placed there was no way to track the order through delivery and to payment to ensure only correct invoices were paid. Paperwork would be missing and things would get missed.
After PLANERGY
PLANERGY gave Brick Klin Garden Centre a central location to store everything. By removing the manual component, they saved 75% of the time they used to spend placing orders with suppliers. Laura says, “It has streamlined the way I buy. It’s made a big difference”.
Not only did they save that time, but they also removed the hassle of needing to track down the paperwork and email threads. Everything is centralized with a single source of truth and all relevant documents stored electronically making everything easier to track.
Spend is managed better resulting in at least 10% savings on their spend. The whole Procure-to-Pay process is streamlined needing less people involved and the people involved are spending less time on the tasks helping to make the company more profitable.
Invoices can now be processed for payment much more quickly and approved for payment based on the approved PO and delivery information ensuring a 3 way-match with no stress. Laura adds, “Jenny in Finance is a lot less stressed. Everything is in one place, she doesn’t need to pull out files from above her head, and she knows how much things are meant to cost”.
Testimonials
It literally saves me 75% of the time I used to spend processing orders. I wouldn’t be able to do it without PLANERGY, it is so streamlined and easy.
Laura Van Der Wee
Owner
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