Turnbull Building Supplies

Turnbull Building Supplies was established in 1895 as a single branch, family owned business in Lincolnshire. Now with six branches they offer a comprehensive product range of building materials, kitchens, bathrooms and tiles. Turnbull supplies customers from retail through to the national house builders.

Embracing change

Turnbull realised that their existing system was neither robust nor scalable to meet the increasing demands of their business. “The software simply couldn’t keep up with our growing organisation and the supplier didn’t have the capacity or resource to make the enhancements we needed,” commented Gary. Turnbull revisited the ERP market. “The situation had changed dramatically from our previous search with software being more intuitive yet containing more comprehensive functionality. Despite the competition, there was still a clear winner for us and that was Kerridge Commercial Systems (KCS), and K8” adds Gary.

Reviewing the market

Kevin Coombs, IT Manager, Turnbull Building Supplies, commented, “We already had a great deal of confidence in KCS as a result of our previous exploration of the market. We also knew people in the industry using earlier versions - many of whom gave us positive feedback about their experiences of the product and company. It was vital to us that whomever we worked with had the capacity, culture, resource and inclination to continue product development to support the needs of Builders’ Merchants moving forward. With K8, all of our bases were covered.”

Moving forward with K8

Company stability and a solid product roadmap were essential to the decision making process. However, K8’s functionality was at the heart of the decision. Kevin continues, “K8 is a really well-packaged product with extensive functionality and an impressive user interface for quick and easy navigation. From a more technical perspective, it has some fantastic features that come as standard.”

Kevin continued “K8’s SOP (Sales Order Processing) is superb; its excellent handling of directs, specials and back-to-backs is second to none. K8’s standard KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and reports allow us to closely, accurately and regularly monitor our progress. And, we love the spreadsheet functionality - you can import and export files for batch updating of prices, stock, margins etc.”

Hosting relieves the pressure

Turnbull opted for the KCS hosted solution. “With a hosted solution, we lose the cost of having to upgrade or replace our hardware every few years,” explains Kevin. “Now, if we need more processing power or disk space etc, we simply tell KCS and they increase our capacity. Now, future scalability is no longer an issue we have to worry about.”

Keeping up with progress

Turnbull has actively sought to improve its IT infrastructure favouring KCS as a ‘one-stop shop’ for its computing needs. After a WAN upgrade, Turnbull have continued to update and upgrade their use of K8. Gary commented “We’ve saved a significant amount of time by implementing Automatic Verification of Supplier Invoices allowing us to automatically pass supplier invoices (based on parameters we’ve set), whether UNIMER, NMBS or directly with suppliers. And there are plenty more features for us to consider moving forward.”

Results

• User interface quick and easy to navigate
• Sales order processing for efficient trading
• KPI facilities - accurate, regular monitoring
• Spreadsheet interface facility
• Automatic supplier invoice verification
• Hosted platform means security and scalability
• Staff can focus attention on customer service
• Higher levels of customer service