Qnetex case study: Savona
What the Savona team love most about Qnetex
“It’s cloud-based, so we can access everything we need from anywhere. Whether we’re on a PC in the office or out and about on a mobile, it’s all instantly available.”
“The platform is fully integrated with ePOD and all our warehouse devices. Everything just works together in a fully joined up way.”
“It’s intuitive to use, so new users can get to grips with it extremely quickly. We’re talking days not weeks, which makes all the difference when you’re moving at speed.”
“It removes any non-value-add administration by systemising or simplifying key processes. So the team can concentrate on valuable and worthwhile tasks.”
“Absolutely everything comes as part of a single solution, from ePOD through to all the warehouse apps. So we don’t need to get any other third party providers involved.”
“It was very easy to get fully integrated with our online platform – and we were able to do it at speed, so we were up and running very quickly.”
Hear from Mike Morgan, Savona’s Managing Director, about how Qnetex supported the company’s vision for future growth
What is your vision for the future and how is Qnetex helping?
“We made an acquisition at the end of the pandemic and we’re now looking at making the most of what we’ve acquired, which means growing our turnover. We don’t want to be the biggest, we simply want to be the best and build a profitable, loyal customer base of the right mix.
It’s all about delivering excellent service and enhancing the customer experience, which is why it’s vital that we have full visibility of stock across each of our warehouses.
Qnetex gives us that visibility and can be bedded in extremely rapidly. It’s also ideal for hub and spoke, which is the business model we’re concentrating on. So it allows us to make the use of the facilities that we’ve got, while simplifying the systems that we’re running by replacing them with one single system and one version of the truth.”
Why was it important for you to move quickly?
“Through the acquisition we had acquired the assets of another company and were looking to consolidate everything across all our sites with one food-service specialist ERP. The legacy system that was being used in the acquisition wasn’t going to be supported in the future, so we needed to act quickly to put an alternative in place.
The last thing we wanted was to commit to another year’s worth of licence fees with incumbent providers of the platform. We were also looking for an ERP that could cope with the concept of hub and spoke, which was going to be key to our future growth. The beauty of Qnetex was that we could hit the ground running, putting in the absolutely essential software for the business to function, then adding other nice-to-haves after that.
With Qnetex, the system was flexible enough to let us move at pace. After we made the acquisition, we were able to go live in just three weeks’ time.”
Didn’t training new users take a lot of time?
“Not at all. Training was streamlined and built into the whole process. All the relevant stakeholders had a couple of hours a day with the Qnetex team for ten days or so. Rather than having to take people out of the business and away from their key tasks, they could be trained while they were all doing essential functions.
We had three sales people who were all still taking orders during the training period. We really were running the business with the new system while we were being trained in how to use it, so we didn’t lose a moment of valuable business – or miss any opportunities – while we made the switch.”
What did you like most about the Qnetex solution?
“There were a number of reasons why Qnetex worked so well for us. The fact that we were able to shape the platform, effectively helping to create the specifications so it would match our business exactly, was a real bonus. As it’s functionally rich for hub and spoke as well as telesales, that’s also a big plus as it fits our business model.
But key for me is the people as much as the system. We didn’t want a parent-and-child relationship, with us being the child. As we implemented the solution, we were talking to people at Qnetex almost every day. Lots of people across the entire team were involved.
We’re a relatively small organisation, and we don’t have an IT specialist in our business. That’s why Qnetex is such a help, as they can bring that expertise to the table without us having to buy it in. We don’t have to deal with lots of different people either, like a provider for the ePOD, and a provider for the apps, for example. It’s a single solution, looked after by the same team, which is really handy for us.”
Find out how Qnetex helps you with everything from processing orders and managing stock to organising your warehouse and tracking deliveries – all in a single ERP