Codegate Delivers Bespoke Future Proof Enterprise Mobility Platform for The Garden Centre Group

Published 5th February 2010

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.

About The Garden Centre Group
The Garden Centre Group is the UK’s largest garden centre group and consists of 121 garden centres.
Garden centres in the Group include Bridgemere Nursery & Garden World in Cheshire, Blooms Garden Centres nationwide, Heighley Gate Nursery & Garden Centre in Northumberland, Old Barn Nursery & Garden Centre in West Sussex, Peter Barratt’s Garden Centres in the North East, Sanders GardenWorld in Somerset and Wyevale Garden Centres nationwide.
To find out more please visit www.thegardencentregroup.co.uk.

About Codegate
Codegate specialises in the provision of robust mobile enterprise solutions that deliver a rapid return on investment through improved productivity, traceability and customer service levels. The company's solutions are used by transport and logistics, distribution, warehousing, retail and field service companies ranging in size from small to medium sized enterprises through to much larger blue chip organisations. Codegate's solutions include mobilevantage – a mobile workforce management solution for small businesses with around 50 mobile workers, mobilecourier - a highly configurable shrinkwrapped proof of delivery solution, mobilelogistics - a dynamic track and trace solution for transport and logistics companies and mobileworker - a real time job scheduling solution designed to optimise the mobile workforce for the medium to large enterprise. Codegate has partnerships with leading rugged mobile hardware providers including Intermec, Honeywell, Motorola, Psion Teklogix and Zebra. For further information please visit www.codegate.co.uk

For more information contact:
Sarah Chidgey
Essential Communications
Tel: +44 (0) 1635 43967
E-mail: sarah@essential-communications.com,
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