Corby & Fellas are delighted to announce that Tong Garden Centre have become one of the latest users of WinRetail, our comprehensive and fully integrated EPoS and Retail Management System.

Charlie Barker, Tong’s Finance Director, contacted Corby & Fellas in the spring 2018, having recently joined the company. Tong were keen to grow their business and wanted to introduce a new, more advanced, system that would support the plans and help to exploit the company’s potential.

He spoke to several larger garden centre businesses and, having received positive reports about Corby & Fellas, decided that he would consider adopting WinRetail.

Fortunately, Corby & Fellas' demonstration to Mark Farnsworth, Charlie Barker and their operations team, was good enough to convince them that C&F had the right software, the technical knowledge and the ability to provide first class support.

There were several specific areas of the business where WinRetail’s potential was clear:

• The Farm Shop, which includes a butchery and delicatessen, uses Bizerba scales to output barcoded labels. The barcode has encoded within it the stock code, price and weight of the item weighed; this is affixed to the packaged item and, subsequently, presented at an EPoS terminal
• The Café/Restaurant sells both ready-prepared food and hot dishes, which are made up in a kitchen, behind the scenes. When a customer orders a hot dish, they order their food at an EPoS terminal, from where the details of their order are transmitted to the kitchen and printed out on a dedicated printer. They have table tracker, this allows the team to locate the customer at whichever table they choose to sit at. 
• Tong required the system to output accurate and timely management reports; such reports being produced to a schedule that ensures that the right report is transmitted to the right person at the right time.
• It is essential that the system integrates with Sage Accounts to reduce the time taken to post data and ensuring its accuracy
• Ability to handle the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• A comprehensive CRM (Customer Relationship Management) module to help in producing and targeting marketing campaigns    

Mark commented: "I think another reason for choosing C&F is the ability of the system to get information out thereby enabling us to make better decisions.  That was a key objective of ours at the start of the project and the C&F system was, in our view, the most advanced."

Pictured: Mark Farnsworth, MD of Tong Garden Centre (left), and Charlie Barker, Finance Director (right) with Steve Fellas of C&F.