Do small firms really need big software?

Customers can be very demanding.

When catering firm Authentic Food prepares a batch of corn-fed chicken supreme in wild mushroom sauce for delivery to pubs, restaurants and hotel groups, its customers want to know a lot.

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"Some want 180 data points, others up to 400 - everything from ingredients, nutritional content, allergy information, the measurements of the box, to information whether the packaging can be recycled," says Parminder Basran, business controller at the Sharston, Greater Manchester, based company.

When the firm started out, some of this information had to be gathered and entered 12 to 15 times, at each step of the production chain.

As the company has grown to 200 staff with a £25m turnover and sales to 11 European countries, Authentic Food had to introduce enterprise resource planning software (ERP) to cope.

It's not just health and safety laws that triggered the flood of data.

"The buyers have put the onus on us, we've been dictated to by the industry and our customers," says Mr Basran.

When spreadsheets won't do

In order to grow, small companies have to use more powerful software.

There are critical points in a company's development where the decision which software tools you adopt is critical to your business. When we moved from four to 10 people and started to put in the manufacturing process, at that point spreadsheets and Outlook just didn't deliver what we needed.

Kevin Smith, general manager and co-founder Cyden

Now no one has to "run across the street any more to alert the manufacturing team" to a new order. "If a customer in India buys 10 systems, the software will immediately tell all teams the impact on stock, purchasing, the bottom line, and that's absolutely critical for us."

If you don't have a coherent system, you rapidly lose control.

At Authentic Food, Mr Basran's team uses SAP's Business One software.

When a company grows as fast as ours, you take on a lot of business and need the IT system to do that effectively

The firm began using the software two years ago (when it had a turnover of just £14m).

Starting with accounting, it has since rolled out other parts of the suite: customer relationship management, purchase ordering, stock management and more.

It has transformed the company, getting the product information and costing for a product launch used to take a hell of a long time. Now we can get it done quickly

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