Background
Nickolls & Perks is a long-established wine and spirits merchant, retailer and importer, which has been in the same family since 1945 and traces its roots as a wine business back to its founding in 1797. Nickolls & Perks addresses a number of important customer groups including fine wine clients, a thriving spirits business, a range of customers typically associated with quality independent retailing (off-trade), and a significant Midlands-focused on-trade business.
As a multi-generational family its focus is on long-term decision-making and investing, resulting in a well-diversified business that is progressive and well placed to weather difficult economic cycles.
For example, the business has been investing for some time in its digital offering, to the point that it has become a significant and growing part of the overall channel mix.
We felt slowed down by our previous system, for example there were limits on items you could add to a sales order. We are now much more productive. Duty paid broking has improved immeasurably. This wasn’t an easy process on Netsuite that involved 7 process steps. Withdrawals were similarly time consuming. En primeur purchase orders (futures) now take seconds to do due to the referential database.
Platform Selection
The rationale for deciding to move off Netsuite onto Wine Hub came down to a number of factors.
Perhaps the most strategic reason spoke to an overriding purpose of Wine Hub – to make things easier for the industry as a whole.
“That desire to help really comes across” explained Will Gardener, “and it is strikingly refreshing. The Wine Hub being industry specific meant that our needs are now being catered for.”
“In comparison, Winesuite was a bolt on to Netsuite and offered nowhere near the industry specificity of Wine Hub, which showed in significant application areas such as brokerage and Liv-ex integration”, added Callum Gardener.
Callum Gardener also revealed, “Just as importantly there was no discernible future roadmap that corresponded to the needs of the business.”
Another key reason was support. “Initially the level of support Netsuite offered was responsive, but over time it waned.”
Rising costs were also becoming a factor that prompted Will to look at alternatives. “The overall cost of ownership was looking increasingly expensive for what Netsuite was offering”.
“Replacing the website was going to cost six figures to move to a new version of the webshop release – Netsuite is a seamless ERP but the integrated web shop wasn’t. Recent releases resulted in significant levels of cart abandonment.”
Business management platforms or ERPs are replaced infrequently. It’s not untypical for reinvestment cycles to be in the region of 8-10 years. So inevitably there was a fair amount of internal resistance to putting the business through another shift just 5 years after having migrated to Netsuite.
However the business case was overwhelming, the business needed to continue to improve its market offering and as Callum explained, “we couldn’t see a future, all we could see was a brick wall”.
Having read a few case studies, the leadership team decided to go with Wine Hub on the basis of it being industry specific and very well-resourced, the latter being an important long-term factor.
Migration
Will took it on himself to lead the project, having had previous experience of migrating data from Sage to Netsuite.
“Moving from Sage to Netsuite had been more painful for the business, with Wine Hub much more intuitive” explained Will. “Consequently the data migration went smoothly, the business transition was quite straightforward with some adjustment to new ways of doing things. There were no moments of panic.”
Solution
Nickolls & Perks have seen numerous operational improvements as a result of moving to Wine Hub.
Referential data
At a fundamental level, the referential database matters. Callum explained “It makes it quicker to create orders, means there is consistency of reporting history and helps with search engine optimisation (SEO). Before, everything was manually raised and inevitably that led to some duplication.”
Picking up on the data management theme, Liz Carra points out that “en primeur purchase orders (futures) now take seconds to do due to the referential database”.
Rhiannon Gardener heads Operations and also sees referential data as having been beneficial. “A main advantage that I have seen is when creating products. In the vast majority of cases the item exists within Wine Hub as an LWIN, this makes it much easier when adding products to purchase orders etc.
“With our previous systems we would have to manually input all of the relevant data, some of which could be done incorrectly or missed out”, continued Rhiannon. “Having the data already there, and knowing that it is correct has saved us a great deal of time.”
Broking
Liz Carra has seen numerous operational efficiencies in her operations and logistics role. “Duty paid broking has improved immeasurably. This wasn’t an easy process on Netsuite that involved 7 process steps. Withdrawals were similarly time consuming.”
“We felt slowed down by our previous system, for example there were limits on items you could add to a sales order. We are now much more productive.”
Inventory management
Another area of improvement Liz noted is inventory management. “The first thing that springs to mind is the ease of repacking cases; we often receive cases in different formats to those that we originally ordered. In Netsuite it was a long, time-consuming process to amend these, but in Wine Hub it is so simple and straightforward. There is no doubt this has saved me a lot of time”, explained Liz.
As the next generation of wine buyers online opt to increasingly buy by the bottle, this repacking flexibility is a time-saver for wine businesses in general, and notably those with a desire to build online sales. At the same time this approach maintains the integrity of inventory management, ensuring flexibility is not at the expense of accuracy.
“Repacking has also come in very helpful when managing storage, raising invoices and being flexible in responding to customers’ withdrawal needs”, added Liz.
We sell on Liv-ex also. The sale goes straight though, a notification confirms it’s gone through, and the transaction immediately shows up as a Hub sales order. Integration with Netsuite was nowhere near as good, and nowhere near as accurate, resulting in duplicated transactions going through. For us that was an absolute nightmare and caused a loss of confidence using it.
Liv-ex
Wine Hub has expanded use of Liv-ex within the business.
“We like how Liv-ex works through the Wine Hub”, commented Will. “Every day we are looking more at what’s available, for what clients and buyers are looking for, then matching bids transact through the Hub immediately. It’s very easy to transact, in fact there’s no easier transaction to do. The ‘bid-offer change since’ API call is a game-changer in terms of up to dateness”.
Point of sale
Nickolls & Perks had not used point of sale (POS) previously, and Wine Hub’s integration with Lightspeed X proved to be a very good thing. “Mastering the data in Hub and allocating to the shop sales channel works well,” highlighted Callum. “It’s a lot quicker and very responsive compared to Netsuite; something that enables us to use POS for our whisky festivals, whereas previously we would have had to hire a POS and that created all sorts of stock issues.”
Webshop
“The webshop is much better than before”, explained Will, “and we no longer get abandoned carts”.
“Working with Wine Owners’ web expert Marco has been really good for us. The new eCommerce build represented very good value for money (a fraction of the amount it would have cost using Netsuite’s eCommerce) and is a platform that enables us to utilise SEO ourselves to the levels of best practise we have set.”
“eCommerce through Wine Hub is operationally efficient to use whereas Netsuite was clunky. It’s easy to split cases as part of how the Hub masters all data elements for eCommerce. It is far more efficient than before, and far quicker to run an en primeur campaign online than ever before.”
Time and money
Wine Hub has proven to be a cost-effective new software platform for Nickolls & perks, has helped the business to be operationally more efficient, and delivers the flexibility required to cover off wide-ranging needs across their lines of business and sales channels.
Rhiannon concluded that “the general feel of Wine Hub and the ease of use is something that I’ve been pleased with. For us as a business it was definitely a positive move.”