Co-Star reduce stock-holding by 40% using ERP to streamline their distribution operation.

Co-Star of Copgrove North Yorkshire are the one of the UK's leading suppliers to the Mobile Communications Industry. Their company mission is to provide a “one-stop shop” for mobile communication engineers who deliver high quality, professional installations.

With over 4,000 product lines including fuse and fuse holders, switches, relays invertors, in-car phone kits, audio mutes and parking sensors, satellite navigation, and vehicle tracking. The Co-Star business is heavily reliant on information technology to support its operational activity.

Co-Star chose the orderline ERP solution supplied by Onesys to help them streamline their operations. Co-Star use an online Web-Catalogue for customer contact, appraisal of technical specifications and product pricing.
This functionality is shortly to be extended to Web-ordering says General Manager Owen Berger. “A distinct and prominent internet presence is absolutely vital for us to compete in a market where a competitor is but a couple of clicks away."

Sales Order Processing customers order through fax, e-mail or the telephone. Orders are then entered into the Orderline Sales Order Processing module which holds all the account and stock information necessary to manage the progress of the order through the business.

In the warehouse delivery paperwork and communications with couriers are all handled through orderline to ensure timely and accurate delivery of Co-Star dispatches.
 
Accounts – once dispatched, goods are invoiced and the relevant details auto-generated for the accounting ledgers. All sales, inventory and accounting data is automatically populated from these operational activities.

So far, so good but perhaps not terribly exciting. It is not unusual for many SME businesses to support their business processes with IT in this way, although it is unusual to find such a neat and compact implementation as that deployed at Co-Star. It is the use of data captured across these operational processes for the support of the purchasing operation that is so extraordinary. By analysing sales trends and stock utilisation, inventory levels are reduced to an optimum generating huge savings in expenditure. One year after the installation of orderline Co-Star reduced their stockholding by 40%.

For many years, “data mining” as this technique is called, has yielded significant business benefits to top tier information technology users. For Co-Star, the innovative use of these methods using onesys orderline has delivered in spades.