The Company

BBWS have been market leaders in the tea warehousing industry for over 2 decades. Situated in Felixstowe, Suffolk, they store tea for leading tea manufacturers prior to its distribution around the UK.

Challenge

The company used an old UNIX based application to take care of their core activities such as managing the overall warehouse, stock control, production of lists, despatch notes and customers invoices. Five networked users were dependent on this application for the successful management of the business. In 2005 BBWS experienced a sudden hardware failure as the company that had previously supported their UNIX application was not able to replace the necessary parts in the UNIX server to get it back on line. They were thus faced with the decision of finding a new and sophisticated replacement application in order to continue operating.

Solution

Through recommendation, BBWS contracted Sapphire to perform their application development and data porting. BBWS opted for a client/server solution, using Net plus as a front-end and MS SQL Server 2000 as a data repository. Half way through development, their UNIX application failed, compelling them to use paper for a while. Sapphire's application development team worked as fast as possible to deliver the new system, even though they had to analyse and re-engineer the data from UNIX which could not be imported straight into SQL Server. This was successfully completed with minimal disruption to the warehouse.

The outcome

The combination of NetPlus with MS SQL Server 2000 has enabled BBWS to efficiently manage their operations and continue being market leaders in the tea warehousing industry.