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Customer Stories

The Deckle Edge

Background

The Deckle Edge supplies specialist paper and materials to artists, graphic designers and crafters in the Western Cape province of South Africa. The company, founded in the mid-1990s, employs around 30 people at five retail outlets and one head office retail and distribution centre.

The Business Need

As a retail business, The Deckle Edge relies heavily on its point of sale (POS) and stock control systems. For several years to mid-2006 the company used a DOS-based package which was becoming obsolete. “The developers were no longer supporting it and if we were going to upgrade to a Windows-based version we wanted to take the chance to look around,” says owner Bruce Dickson, “especially since we were unhappy with the service we were getting from our distributor. We wanted to create a good, solid technical foundation to support future business growth.”
Unsure how to find the best solution for its own needs, The Deckle Edge initially opted for a POS module from a leading global enterprise software company, implementing it in August 2006. The experience was “an absolute disaster,” says Dickson. “Basically we were sold a pre-beta version that was riddled with bugs, and poorly implemented on top of it. Our supplier kept pretending to know what was going on when they clearly didn’t. We were getting inaccurate information at the most basic level; for example, it wasn’t clear whether an account customer had paid or not. It was the most useless piece of software I ever saw and made our customer relationships very difficult.”

The Solution

A couple of months into this disastrous implementation, Dickson heard by chance about HansaWorld’s software and called Cape Town supplier Unilynx. “We were very nervous about making another bad choice so it took several months for us to make a decision,” says Dickson. “The system did look confusing at first because we’d never seen anything similar before, but we liked the fact that it was well tried and tested, had international backing and good backup and support. We also had a good relationship with Unilynx – our business is quite different from others they’ve worked with but they never pretended to know what was going on if they didn’t. They made a real effort with us.”
Eventually Dickson decided that HansaWorld’s advanced technology was right for his business and the point of sale module was implemented in early May 2007.

The Results

A few weeks after the implementation, Dickson was able to report that HansaWorld was “working fantastically, especially in the back office. It’s absolutely real-time and live, so if I change a price or add a customer that information is instantly available to all my branches. It really enables you to see what’s going on. I’m still getting used to it but I can move around very quickly and easily and find stuff out, it’s very clear. I definitely have a better grasp of what’s happening in the business.”

“HansaWorld is very easy to use and definitely far superior to anything else we’ve seen” – Bruce Dickson

There were “some glitches with the communications setup at the beginning,” says Dickson. “The connection between our branches and the server wasn’t reliable. The problem was with our network setup and it took Unilynx a while to find it, but they went about the task very methodically and fixed it in a reasonable amount of time. Now it’s working perfectly.”
Having made significant investments in new hardware for the previous implementation in 2006, Dickson has not had to lay out any major new expenses to run HansaWorld. “We decided it was better to run a dedicated server and we upgraded some printer equipment, but that was relatively inexpensive.”
In future, Dickson says The Deckle Edge plans to move all its financial management to HansaWorld as well. “Our stock system is in disarray after the previous disaster so we’re going to take some time to sort that out and get used to the way HansaWorld works,” he says. “We hope to move the rest of the business over at the beginning of our next financial year. We’re confident this is a system that can take us into the future.”



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