Oxford, UK: 3 February, 2010

The Garden Centre Group, the UK’s largest garden centre retailer, has successfully upgraded its existing mobile stock control infrastructure with a tailor made future proof enterprise mobility platform from Codegate. The new solution has been rolled out across The Garden Centre Group’s 121 retail outlets around the UK and runs on Motorola MC3090 rugged hand held terminals.

“Our existing stock control infrastructure needed to be updated. Our legacy hardware had served us well but was becoming costly to maintain and repair, and no longer provided the memory capacity to store our large product files,” said Sophie Vyse, Project Manager, Store Systems, for The Garden Centre Group. “It was time for a hardware refresh and this gave us the opportunity to leverage the latest enterprise mobility technology and enhance the functionality of our existing stock control software.”

Codegate worked closely with The Garden Centre Group to develop a solution to deliver the additional functionality now required. Using the MC3090, Codegate’s bespoke software enables The Garden Centre Group’s employees to carry out stock functions such as ordering stock, price checks and stock takes, all via the hand held terminal from any location in the store or outside. Operating in batch collection mode, all data captured by the software is uploaded from the mobile computer to central back office systems providing The Garden Centre Group with visibility of its business operations.

Codegate was chosen from a list of eight other possible suppliers. “Having written the existing stock control application some time ago, Codegate’s development team has a proven track record of success with us and has existing knowledge and experience of The Garden Centre Group’s business processes. This understanding allowed Codegate to migrate a lot of our existing functionality to the new solution, importantly reducing the need for the re-training of our users,” explained Chris Thomas, IT Business Analyst, The Garden Centre Group’s Systems.

“The Codegate team is always responsive and sets realistic expectations, providing all the ingredients of a trusted partnership, making it the natural choice to quickly deploy a competitive high quality reliable solution,” added Vyse.

Crucially, the MC3090’s functionality provides the option for The Garden Centre Group to move to real time data capture using wireless connectivity and to implement mobile printing at a later date, thus ensuring the company keeps pace with its evolving business requirements.

“Once again, Codegate proved its commitment to ensuring the successful deployment of the new solution by delivering a pilot, which met our requirements within challenging timescales, at two of our garden centres. Codegate then completed the installation and roll out to the remaining garden centres within The Group in six weeks, again meeting our tight schedule,” concluded Vyse.