Digital Village Case Study
Retail experience wins through for K3 Landsteinar at Digital Village…
IntroductionDigital Village, the UK’s premier hi-tech music retail chain, has selected a single source for all its retail management software in the shape of Microsoft Business Solutions – Navision 3.6 from Microsoft Business Solutions partner, K3 Landsteinar. BackgroundJohn Da Costa who is the current owner and managing director started Music Village in 1979. The first shop was opened in Dagenham and grew from there. There are currently eight retail stores.
The company has 120 employees. The Head Office and Warehouse is based in Essex, and Educational Sales, trading as Music Village, are run from this site with 50-60 employees.The educational side of the business has gone from strength to strength and has grown to be the leading national supplier to education for musical equipment. They are definitely a major player in the business with a great reputation. The stores trade as Digital Village and specialise in selling and installing pro-audio to studios, professional musicians and end-users. ProblemAccording to Paul Dennis, joint deputy managing director, the existing systems simply couldn’t keep pace with the company’s rapid growth.
Based on Claris and Sage he said, “The old system wasn’t expandable, was slow on processing and was very inflexible as the company grew.” The company therefore decided to investigate different types of software that would help grow the business and decided at that time on another software product that they felt could meet their business needs and requirements. This decision proved unsuccessful, as Dennis explains; “The reseller’s project managers kept changing so there was no consistency of support. Also, modifications that we asked for were simply not being finalised. In the end, the system they built for us never went live despite us persevering with it for two years. Cutting our losses, we decided to look for another solution.
” This time, the company decided to look even more thoroughly at what was available. It reviewed Geac (Streamline), Exchequer, Hansa (Virtual) and, Microsoft Navision. Digital Village settled on Microsoft Navision 3.6, with modules covering general ledger, sales and receivables, inventory, business alert server and purchasing payables for 75 concurrent users. However, the real challenge was to find a reseller with the experience to implement the software.
Microsoft put Digital Village in contact with two Microsoft Navision resellers but K3 Landsteinar won hands down because of it’s vast retail experience. As Dennis added, “K3 Landsteinar simply seemed to understand our business better.” The Digital Village people also hit it off straight away with the K3 Landsteinar account people, Matt Dredge and managing director Ian Humphries. Dennis explains, “K3 Landsteinar asked us what we wanted but also asked us if we had thought about various other things that they could provide solutions for. They had the greater appreciation of what we wanted.
” K3 Landsteinar actively demonstrated what the product could do, when Digital Village decided to update its store systems, K3 Landsteinar would be able to provide a solution and one that would integrate with head office systems. Dennis reports on early benefits of the new Microsoft Navision systems. “We have seen great savings in time to process and extract information. Reports are more accurate and at our fingertips so we can see how all areas of the business are doing. Transfer of stock is so much easier and all items are traceable.
We can see the cost of each item and pricing changes can be made much more easily. The most recent project involves deliveries. Dennis explains, “We are working on integration with UPS (couriers) and are continuing to enhance the system now it has been up and running for a while”.For Further Informationhttp://www.TheNavisionPeople.com
