Intelligent automation generates significant commercial savings for Armitage’s Garden Centre
Price, product quality and excellent customer service have always been the three critical success factors for those operating within the garden centre industry but, in a extremely competitive and maturing marketplace, garden centres are finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate their offerings to the customer. In response to this, Armitage’s has taken the innovative approach of automating its back office activities, through TaskCentre, with the aim of creating new front end competitive advantages.
“Our industry as a whole is very customer-centric, but very few competitive gains are left to be achieved from this approach. As a result, we decided to systematically automate our back-office activities through the use of TaskCentre,” said David Whitwam, IT Manager, Armitage’s Garden Centre. “The commercial savings we have achieved through the intelligent automation of our administrative tasks have been significant and the effect on our front end competitive performance is transparent to all within the company.”
Armitage’s Garden Centre is the first company in its industry to embrace business process management technology and it is expected that other companies within this highly competitive sector will quickly follow suit.
“In a fast moving B2C environment, such as the garden centre industry, successful companies work smarter than their competitors,” said Philip Smith, Managing Director, Orbis Software. “Armitage’s is such a company, as it has saved a considerable amount of time and money by automating those employee business processes that many organisations continue to assign people to conduct.”
About Armitage’s Garden Centre
Based in West Yorkshire, Armitage’s Garden Centre is a well established and respected provider of quality indoor style, outdoor living, pets and aquatics, machinery and planting products to consumers. The company has two large centres based in Huddersfield and employs approximately 150 members of staff.
