The A&S Group are one of the largest independent electrical appliance and interiors retailers in the North West. Based just outside city centre Manchester, The A&S Group have grown rapidly over the last 5 years and now have an annual turnover exceeding £5M.

The A&S Group were the first pre-release programme partner and went live with eQuest Enterprise on 3rd February 2003. Having been heavily involved with the Adaptev development team over the previous 18 months to help provide real-world input into the on-going design and development of eQuest, the management at A&S knew they were getting an extraordinarily functional system. The level of integration pervasive within eQuest is something that no-one in the industry has at their fingertips and even larger companies with expensive bespoke software could not lay claim to.

While teething problems were inevitable and A&S, staff and management alike, had to endure the software’s growing pains in the short term, they knew that by working closely with Adaptev they would have massive benefits in the long term.

eQuest is deployed at A&S between their large retail outlet and offices and their warehouse and distribution facility several miles away and is deployed on 40 workstations. eQuest will also be implemented in their new branch at Altrincham when opened later this year. While all sales are made at the showroom, 90% of deliveries and customer collections take place from their warehouse. With full integration the distribution manager knows immediately the stock that needs to be picked, the availability of delivery drivers and daily capacity based on available manpower resources (integrated with the personnel system), and the delivery times promised to the customer by the sales staff.

Special orders make up a huge percentage of the company’s sales and the system fully caters for and integrates all the processes involved. A big advantage that the company has as an independent is they can cater for virtually everything their customer’s need rather than stock and sell in volume a limited number of products like the large chains. The only way to keep a tight check on this is to integrate and automate many of the processes involved. A&S purchasing manager can look at all special orders being generated throughout the day and assign each one to a supplier and issue the purchase order.

With their expansion into the interiors market A&S now offer a comprehensive kitchen, bathroom and bedroom (KBB) design, supply and installation service. This presented a particularly complex issue with all of the different ranges, styles, colours, sizes, packs, upgrades and pricing options that had to be catered for. Using eQuest’s extremely flexible stock management facilities all of this has been catered for in a very straightforward and fully integrated way. eQuest is proven as an ideal solution for home interiors (KBB) retailers and suppliers.

A&S previously used 4 entirely separate software programmes to automate their business. This meant that their vertical market stock and sales system was separate from their accounting system which was separate from their distribution software and so on. With eQuest everything their business does is entirely integrated and is agile enough to be adapted to changing procedures in their business and expanding requirements.

As the first company to deploy, use and rely on the software for their entire operations without any parallel running of their old systems was not without its challenges however overcoming these challenges has been a very rewarding experience for both A&S management and staff and the Adaptev team.

If you would like to know more about eQuest Enterprise and being involved in the Commercial Partner programme please contact us on 0870 428 3011.