Longacres Looks To IT For Growth

K3 Landsteinar has transformed sales and stock management at Longacres Nursery with an integrated retail management system.

..Longacres Nursery is one of the largest garden centre outlets in the South East of England, with 300 staff. Situated on nine acres of land at Bagshot, Surrey, just off Junction 3 of the M3, it also boasts one of the largest cut flower departments in the whole of the country.Two years ago, the company was running mainly manual tills and decided to upgrade to electronic point of sale to handle an increasing volume of transactions.

However, the systems chosen at the time failed to handle these high volumes.As IT manager, Mike Ainley explains, “We have 60,000 SKUs in store at any one time and the volume is growing. We were also unable to access the data we needed to run our business.”K3 Landsteinar was chosen after an extensive trawl of the vendor market for its dedicated retail experience and pre-eminence in the garden centre market, which includes Dobbies, Rhs, Hayes and Van Hague.Longacres chose Navision Retail 3.

6 across its 15 tills. The results have been dramatic. Ainley explains, “The implementation and the addition of new tills was very easy and the new system has allowed us to manage a number of processes that we couldn’t before. For instance, we now trust the data that we are being given and this means an accurate stock take. It also means a much quick stock take, a saving of five days work.

“”We can also now manage promotions in the same way as a much larger retailer. We can also set them up more quickly. In addition, we have 800 account customers and we are currently in a trial to integrate the whole billing process.””For the future, because we are getting so much more data through, on sales and stock turn and the like, we believe that there are many more ways we can use the system.”