Theo Paphitis makes K3 the choice of entrepreneurs at Ryman

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Theo Paphitis makes K3 the choice of entrepreneurs at Ryman.

High street stationery retailer, Ryman, has successfully implemented a new head office system covering Financials, Inventory Management and Distribution with a single, integrated system from K3, provider of Microsoft Dynamics, and is reporting strong return on its investment. Theo Paphitis, chairman of the Rymans chain and star of BBCs Dragons Den was instrumental in the selection of the Microsoft Dynamics based IT infrastructure that manages around 250 Ryman stores.

Simon Lakin, Finance Director at Ryman, said, The new system has given us the ability to analyse our data much more quickly, enabling us to make more informed business decisions. Previously, to create a Monday trading pack, wed start working on it on a Sunday.  As soon as the sales data was available for Saturday, wed start running downloads, and running extracts.  Thats a thing of the past, now people arrive to work on Monday morning and the reports are sitting in their inbox, or on their screen and they can log on to the web and get the information through the web browser, so that has been a huge improvement. There isnt the risk that the data is incorrect, everything now comes out of the same database, so theres a single source of information.

The system has also led to improved efficiencies in the warehouse.  Lakin continued, Previously we used to have the same product in two different locations replenishing two different businesses.  Our previous system was time consuming and we ran the risk of error.  It was a case of downloading information, manipulating it, putting it into data dumps and creating spreadsheets, now, with the BI system that we have in place, we can get our office products directly into the system and thats a huge benefit.

John Little, Sales Director at K3, said, We are delighted that Ryman is seeing such great benefits since choosing to work with K3.  It is a crucial part of any retailers business to know exactly what stock you have and where it is.  We look forward to an ongoing relationship and supporting them with their future growth plans.