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A Complete ERP Business Management System
Technologies Used
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.NET Core
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SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines
.NET Framework
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Azure Function Apps
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Multiple API Integrations
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Azure DevOps
Results
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Has over 30 office based and remote employees
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Handles over 150,000 retail and trade orders per year
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Multiple API integrations with suppliers and customers
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Reporting for stock, customer, financial and supplier purchasing
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Software that works exactly how the end-users want it to work
The Partner
Rex London is a leading wholesaler and retailer of homeware, gifts, toys and games that have been designed for every occasion. They’re an established business having started some many decades ago on the streets of London’s Portobello Road.
Their beautiful, fun and quirky products can now be found across the entire globe. They were also awarded the 2019 Queen’s Award for Enterprise which was given for outstanding continuous growth in overseas sales.
Background
The partner was using a legacy Windows based application that provided the functionality for the operating of their business on a day-to-day basis.
The system had become dated and there were multiple points of concern including: reliability, scalability, and performance. The system was entirely hosted on premises, using their own servers. Their offices had experienced several power cuts, resulting in downtime of the server dues to crashes from the drives inside the servers.
The system was also not scalable. The business was experiencing growth which meant additional users were using the system, however this had led to the performing declining. The traditional software was developed as a monolithic application and so it could not be “scaled out” (the ability to run multiple instances of functions at the same time). Instead, to mitigate the performance issues, the purchasing of costly higher performance hardware was done which in-turn, increased their budget to support and maintain that hardware.
One of the client's needs as a business was that they must remain at a competitive advantage, this meant having an IT solution and system that could adapt fast to the changes in the economic climate.
Solution
We were first approached in 2014 when cloud adoption was still in its infancy. However in agreement with the client, we proposed to become early adopters of the emerging cloud functionality. We approached this with caution, and suggested we implement a hybrid environment, and choose a handful of available Azure services.
fulfilment and accounts reporting
Our aim was that we would retain a fallback to the on-premise environment, should there be any reliability issues with the cloud ecosystem.The transition to a hybrid environment resulted in less reliance on their on-premises servers. It allowed employees to work remotely, and the move also provided an increase to service reliability, performance and redundancy. It was now possible to scale up or scale out whenever required.There was also a particular focus on migrating the on-premises SQL Server to Azure since its current configuration on their own server was a single point of failure and a cause for concern.
Having reviewed the various methods of migrating this we chose to use SQL Server on an Azure Virtual Machine and took advantage of the automated backups, automated patching, improved security features and the SQL best practices assessment tool.
Since successfully migrating to the new system, we have continued developing and supporting the system to the present day.Cloud technology has now matured and has become widely adopted and so the system is further integrated and depends on cloud services. As the business continues to grow, we in turn are available to adapt to it. One such example of requiring fast change was when the United Kingdom left the European single market economy (Brexit). We quickly implemented changes to handle the way goods are exported to the European market.
The business management system continues to provide a full range of business functionality to the client including: order management for both B2B and B2C customers, generating supplier purchase orders, customer invoicing, stock management, warehouse fulfilment and accounts reporting.
Features
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Customer
Search, add, modify and delete customers. Multiple delivery and branches support. Integration with trade website. Customer terms of usage agreement. Marketing opt-in. Multi currency. Credit limit. VAT and Export support. EXW / DDP / Customs support. Customer messaging. Annual turnover comparison. Purchase history. Statement of account PDF generation.
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02
Cash and Carry
Provides cash and carry sales order taking. Barcode scanning and Excel importing.
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Sales Orders
Create sales orders, multi currency, proforma or account support. Quick order scanning via barcode reader or search. Multi warehouse support. Product discount support. Easy stock availability reporting.
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