Sharps Brewery
Sharps Brewery is a long established brewery based in Rock in North Cornwall.
Finance Director Joe Keohane, says: “As a business that is trading across the South, we are a long way from some of our customers, so using technology to increase our effectiveness has been a key part of our strategy.
Supported by the actnow flex project, Sharps introduced flexible working for their sales team in 2007. The company has installed a Virtual Private Network, so that the staff can log onto the office systems from home.
Joe says: “Our staff are based across Cornwall and the South West. Flexible working allows our sales team to be more productive. They all now work from home at least one day a week, using that time to put in regular calls to each of their customers. The time they save on travelling to the office is time that can be put to better use building the customer relationships. The staff make use of our two main tools – Sage and our Goldmine CRM system – by logging in remotely.”
Joe continues: ‘In theory, flexible working should be a real step forward for our business and to an extent it is. However, we find that we are constantly hitting a barrier, which is that we do not have enough bandwidth.
“This means that at certain times of the day, it can be very frustrating for our guys trying to get access to the Virtual Private Network. If the systems are unavailable, they obviously cannot make the productivity gains they otherwise could.
“As we expand, we intend to recruit additional sales staff elsewhere in the UK. This will make the viability of flexible working still more vital an issue for us.”
As well as finding the current broadband does not fully support their use of the Virtual Private Network, Sharps are frustrated by the time taken to upload large files to their Electronic Data Interface (EDI)
Joe says: “We interact with many of our larger customers through EDI. Customers use it to place orders and we use it to transmit invoices and delivery information back to them. Some of these files are very large and it takes a long time to upload them at present. This ties up our staff in an unproductive way and also impacts on the whole system, slowing it down still further.
“With next generation access, we hope that significantly improved broadband speeds will eradicate these frustrations, enabling us to take full advantage of flexible working and the productivity gains that are there to be won.”
