David Phillipson and John Heading launched Bulwell Timber in 1981. The company started out in a rented ex-dye works with £12,000 pounds of stock, a cross-cut saw, a transit truck and no customers! While one of the partners manned the store, the other went out in the shared car looking for business.

But in the succeeding years the company put in the hard work and it prospered. It moved to a new one and a half-acre site in 1994 and a 13,000ft2 warehouse, mill and trade centre was built. Today, from this modern, well-equipped site, timber, sheet materials, joinery and ironmongery is supplied to builders and the public across Nottinghamshire. The daily advice notes average is now 240, with six product lines on each.

Selecting software

As part of its development, Bulwell also installed a computer system in 1984; a bespoke package written in Applesoft basic, “a language about as common as Cornish” commented David Phillipson.

This system served the company well, but when the programmer who wrote and supported it retired, it was clear the time had come for a replacement.

“We needed a system that could handle timber, had fast point of sale, and could be used by any of our 16 staff,” said Mr Phillipson. “In our size of company, everybody needs to be able to make a sale, place an order on a supplier or produce a quote. We didn’t want a complicated multi-branch system that was slow and difficult to master.”

Bulwell also needed a system that could cope with conversion from cubic to lineal metres, had a timber tally facility and dealt simply with stock. It ruled out several systems because of complexity or cost of installation and support, but then looked at the Windows-based system from Spruce Computers. Mr Phillipson and Mr Heading were impressed from the initial demonstration but wanted to see the system operating in a British timber merchant. As Mr Heading observed, 300 American merchants might well be happy with Spruce, but the two countries don’t always trade the same way.

Mr Phillipson paid a visit to another Spruce customer to see the system working and get an impartial view. The next day Bulwell placed the order.

&#8220We needed a system that could handle timber, had fast point of sale, and could be used by any of our 16 staff.”

David Phillipson, Bulwell Timber

The installation

The nine-user Windows network was installed at the end of November 2001, with three terminals in the counter area and the rest in the sales and accounts office. The counter terminals are wired to a quality advice note and receipt printer and two cash drawers with supermarket type till receipt printers for low value cash sales. In addition, bar code readers were included to speed the sale of Bulwell’s pre-packed ironmongery.

The office terminals share dot matrix and laser printers and product, customer and supplier data from the existing system was converted into Excel spreadsheets allowing the company to create their own product codes. The additional flexibility of Spruce software (which costs an average of £1,500 per user) also enabled Bulwell to review their price structures.

Less then six weeks later the Spruce system went live, with all stock levels, account balances and customer terms set up.

Six months on

The first and most important test of the SpruceWare was the reaction of customers and counter staff. Bulwell says it was overwhelmingly favourable.

According to Mr Heading, an immediate plus of the new system was its facility to produce yard orders and advice notes at point of sale. They had previously been raised manually and input later.

“We are also impressed with the automatic pricing to customer terms, both for credit and cash accounts, and the way the system scans for confirmed quotations at point of sale.”

Mr Phillipson added: “It’s also been refreshing that, although the programmers may be in the US, they are prepared to visit and listen to us, producing enhancements to the system as a result of our input. The support and training from Spruce UK in Haslemere has been excellent too and now hardly a day goes by without us discovering some feature or extra benefit from SpruceWare.”