Epicurium

Based in County Durham, Epicurium is a food wholesalers and distributors, supplying mostly healthy snacks, drinks and meal solutions.

Founded in 2009, the company today employs 10 members of staff and offers around 450 different product lines, all of which are purchased from UK suppliers. Orders are then received from customers via telephone, fax, email and their ZenCart website, as well as a few via their own smartphone app.

In an average month, Epicurium will usually receive around 800 orders from their trade customers and peaking at around 2500 orders from their B2C and fulfilment customers.

Epicurium decided to implement OrderWise not too long after launching in late 2009. We spoke to Ben McKechnie, Director of Epicurium, who took the time to tell us how OrderWise has introduced fast, controlled processes into the company and, as a result, helped promote growth.

With the decision made, Ben set out to find a software suite that would be able to keep up with the company’s rapid growth and also help take the business forward. However, most importantly, Epicurium required a solution that would bring their sales, purchasing and fulfilment together, so that they no longer relied on manual, paper-based processing.

“We wanted something that would import the web orders, keep track of stock coming in and out, print off all the relevant documents and integrate with our couriers. This would mean all we needed to do was pick the boxes, seal it up, press a button and then that would print off the delivery note and courier label ready to be applied to the box. Essentially the key thing we were looking for was a straightforward solution that would allow us to eliminate human error.”

Ben and his team looked around at a number of different software providers, however once they encountered OrderWise they knew they had found the right solution.

With Epicurium finalising their decision to go with OrderWise, the implementation process began. As is standard with any purchase of OrderWise, Epicurium was assigned their own Projects Team to help them learn how to use the software and also get it correctly set up ready for going live. Ben explained how the assistance him and his team received through this stage was nothing short of exemplary.

“Installation and training all went very well, in terms of learning the basic operations it was dead easy. The import processing and test despatching of orders was also very straightforward.”

Following a stress-free implementation, Epicurium officially went live with OrderWise in early 2010. So the big question is, how has using OrderWise been able to help Epicurium over the last five years and beyond?

However, it is not just on the despatch side that Epicurium has managed to see massive improvements to the way they were working before but also on the sales order processing side too. Ben mentioned how his sales team has been able to maximise all their sales opportunities by using the real-time stock feed OrderWise is able to provide through dynamic and accurate stock management.

“We’ve been putting all sales through OrderWise itself and that’s been really quite pivotal as we now have live stock information and details of when stock is due to arrive. Also we previously weren’t able to do regional analysis to see where the sales were coming from and the precise value of each of our customers. Now we can do that analysis very easily, so we can see very, very quickly the profitability of each order as well as the overall customer. To do that previously would have been laborious, whereas with OrderWise it couldn’t be easier.”

This effective management of their outlays and profitability has indeed proven key to Epicurium as it has meant the company has been able to expand quite dramatically in the five years since it started using OrderWise. When asked what has been the biggest change to Epicurium’s operation since they started using OrderWise, Ben quite simply said the scale.

“We may have started from a very small base, but I’d say, turnover wise, we’re probably ten times the size we were when we first started with OrderWise.”