Case Study: Cotswolds Distillery

As your business grows, your logistics systems need to develop at the same time, or you will develop bottlenecks. This means missed deliveries, frustrated customers and confusion in your warehouse. You can become a victim of your own success

No such danger for Cotswolds Distillery, who produce a range of whiskies and gins at their distillery, warehouse and visitor centre complex nestled among the hedgerows in the countryside of Stourton, home of the whimsical English poet, Pam Ayres.

Stock Management

They have a complex operation, as a multi-channel business selling across B2B, On-trade, off-trade, supermarkets, D2C through their own retail shops and their own website, so stock management is essential to cope with demand and grow the business. They have multiple warehouses, including bonded and non-bonded. Regular management information is required, both including and excluding duty, with a board pack every month.

They needed a stock management system to control purchase orders, assemblies and sales orders so they can see live stock levels of finished goods at any time.

Integrated Solution

Outserve worked with Cotswolds Distillery to build a solution that would simplify their systems, with all elements working seamlessly together.

Initially it looked like the solution would be an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system but we realised that by using the best cloud solutions integrated together, The Distillery could benefit from the latest technology along with automation and integration to save time. This solution is scalable, crucial for this rapidly-growing business.

Dream Team

We brought together a dream team of Xero, Unleashed, Shopify, A2X, Vend and Power BI.

We chose this software for their known ability to integrate and work well with each other. The Xero accounting packages fits well with the A2X e-commerce platform, while Unleashed real-time inventory control software complements Vend cloud-based point-of-sale and retail management software perfectly. Finally, Power BI keeps everyone in the picture – literally. An interactive data visualization program, it is perfect in this system for see-at-a-glance reporting purposes.

One-Stop-Shop Technical Support

But with six products, you don’t want to have to call six helplines for support. Outserve is your technical support centre for every product we install – we cover the entire system. The aim is to simplify, not complicate.

Outserve scoped the solution from scratch, migrating the client from their existing Sage 50 solution that was not giving them the required control and management information. We project-managed and implemented the complete solution and integration with all key systems. Further to go live, Outserve continue to support their essential systems and act as their outsourced systems, data and reporting team.

Cotswolds now have a completely integrated solution across Finance, Inventory Management, Retail Tills, Ecommerce, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Reporting, meaning that they have access to real-time stock and inventory quantities and values allowing the business to plan for the short, medium and long term.

We look forward to watching Cotswolds Distillery grow and grow!