It’s hard to overstate the importance of the right technology infrastructure for your business. Although it may feel like a luxury at times, the benefits are far-reaching, from efficiency gains to peace of mind. Here, Kate Dixon, Managing Director of Yarwood Leather, shares the reasons behind the company’s excitement about its new systems – something she would never have believed she’d be so enthusiastic about.
With prestigious customers around the world, Yarwood Leather has a strong reputation for its quality and service in delivering leather and faux leather for commercial seating, plus cutting, sewing and embossing services.
The company was the first UK leather supplier to achieve quality standard ISO9000:2000, and currently has a quality management system approved to ISO9001:2015. It also has a laboratory and leather testing facilities running in line with the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS).
Yet the company’s unreliable technology had been letting the side down and giving the directors sleepless nights, causing a world of frustration and worry. The 17-strong team’s incredible success had increasingly been in spite of its systems, not because of them.
It’s a common story for many long-established businesses. Yarwood was founded in 1967, and the technology and processes had grown up with the company, but there comes a point when everything needs overhauling. It’s daunting and takes a significant investment of time, energy and money, but the benefits are numerous.
Kate explains: “We had a couple of bad outages where it took some time to get everything back up and running.
“We were lucky because we have experienced staff who managed workarounds to deal with things manually. We were able to later scan barcodes on the products after we got the system back up and running. But it was terrifying that it had become that wobbly.”
But all that has now changed, with the introduction of a new system.
Physical servers, outdated Microsoft software and old hardware have been replaced with customised Microsoft 365 Business Central software on the cloud and vastly upgraded hardware. The company received a High Impact Grant of £33,491 from Digital Enterprise to help it achieve the £83,728 project.
Kate adds: “I wouldn’t normally be this excited about a computer project, but it is making a world of difference to us. We have so many more productive hours in the day now we’re not struggling with IT issues.
“The support we’ve had from our Digital Advisor, Jack Pitfield, and the grant funding to enable this project has been great – it’s lovely that they’ve been happy to help us, so that we can grow our sales, provide a better service, and be more efficient in every way.”
The highly regulated industry was proving to be a barrier to adopting new technology before now, with the need for barcodes and full traceability of every hide. With the grant funding meaning the company has been able to replace all its systems, the team is enjoying smoother processes, taking out a lot of paperwork and manual procedures.
Kate jokes that the company will have to find other ways to keep its team fit, as they now don’t need to be physically moving paper orders around the factory. But joking aside, the positive environmental impact and time saved for the team moving forward will be significant.
The benefits for the company are manifold, with lots of seemingly small changes adding up to make things more efficient and user-friendly for its customers and team.
“We have remote support instantly, rather than having to have an engineer physically come on-site,” Kate says.
She continues: “We have two-factor authentication for everything and easier access for our sales team, who are out on the road seeing customers, to access the system and see live data.”
Moving data around the business, between customers and agencies such as HMRC is also easier. The system integrates with the company’s existing payroll system and allows the company to do VAT returns more easily.
Looking beyond the more immediate benefits, Kate says the longer-term implications are significant, with the new systems enabling more accurate financial information and the easier analysis of customer data to make better decisions for the company.
There’s also the positive impact of being able to do more online sales in the future, especially for international customers, who will be able to see stock availability and purchase online outside of business hours.
Kate adds: “We’ll start with looking at selling the off-the-roll faux leather products online. In time we may do further work with an IT partner to find a way that we could sell the leather hides online too.”
With the challenges the company had faced with their previous IT infrastructure, it’s no surprise that Kate is eagerly anticipating switching focus to other strategic priorities.
She concludes: “With the vast scope of what’s available to us in the software, there’s no knowing where it can take us. It’s far more powerful than anything we’ve had before and we are looking forward to this leading to more growth. With the enhanced efficiency, we are being freed up to target more effort into looking at other markets that we’re not already in, and we’re also going to add roles to our sales team to drive that forward.”
With the help of Digital Enterprise, we expect to:
- Increase our turnover by 21% from £3.3m to £4m in 2025/26 and reduce our environmental impact through improving efficiency, reducing paperwork and streamlining processes.
- Grow our sales by offering national and international customers the opportunity to buy some of our products online.
- Enjoy more peace of mind, better decision-making and greater opportunities for sales growth through enhanced security, data and functionality.
