Company
The Bacardi-Martini group
needs no introductions as their range of designer and traditional drinks and
spirits are known the world over.
Operating from their main base in Southampton, the group also encompasses
the First Drinks Brands distribution company, also the purveyor of many
well-known spirits and wines such as Glenfiddich Scotch whisky and many
other famous brands.
A multimillion pound turnover and trading success at this level brings its
own share of issues in distribution and control as Peter Cooke, Bacardi’s
senior IT project manager explains.
Bacardi run and develop an ERP system based on the GEAC Drinks AS400
package, although we have the source and have done a great deal of our own
development in-house, there are just some things that you need a good third
party system for, as it is impractical to develop everything yourself
Peter continues, “Based on our need to operate two companies from a single
resource, formatting and delivering the correct documents, in the correct
format in the right identity to the correct location was a real headache,
this is where SabreFDI stepped in”.
The POD Nightmare!
Like many companies Bacardi used to produce their despatch documents on
multipart stationary with matrix printers, this caused a number of issues.
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Delivery errors were being
made, as on a number of occasions the poor output quality of the matrix
documents was being misinterpreted.
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The multi-part stationery for
the two companies for this task was very expensive, as was maintenance of
the (almost solely dedicated) printers.
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The A3 size documents were
unpopular as they were difficult to file and handle.
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Other customs based documents
concerning the movement, bonding and storage of alcoholic beverages also
needed to be produced at the same location, also in multi-part sets.
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At a future date the company
wished to scan the returning Pod’s and knew the current size and quality
of the documents would make this very difficult.
Peter says in conclusion "With
FDI products and technical assistance we moved all our customer facing
documents over to laser printing using SabreFDI to both format the documents
and control the delivery. Our despatch documents have much improved in
quality with the move to A4. By using SabreFDI we now print 4 copies on
different coloured NCR treated paper from different trays on HP 8000
printers, each 4 document set being individually marked and each set is
automatically stapled together. Costs are lower all round and most
importantly the instances of delivery errors due to incorrectly interpreted
documents have fallen dramatically". |
