The Company

Moda in Pelle is a footwear merchandising company with branches across England - from Bluewater in the South, and Bristol in the West, to the Midlands and North. Established in 1975, Moda in Pelle specializes in innovative and fashionable footwear and accessories which are retailed through their own branches, by direct sales and also by a small number of exclusive outlets operated by their wholesale clients.

Challenge

Moda in Pelle created their first business system using DataEase for DOS. As their business grew, so did the demands on the applications that they had become reliant upon. This prompted Moda in Pelle to convert these applications to a client/server system which would provide them with scalability and reliability, whilst maintaining the familiarity with their current system. They chose NetPlus.

Solution

The first step in the conversion involved moving Moda in Pelle's data from DataEase to Sybase and then converting their warehousing module to NetPlus. Moda in Pelle carried out this work themselves but later on called in Sapphire to help with the conversion of their other core business systems.

This involved converting key modules such as sales order processing, goods received, despatch, stock control to NetPlus as well as their integration with an Accounts package. New features were created, such as automatic e-mailing of orders and printing barcode labels for warehouse automation and tracking. Crystal Reports was used to produce many of the outputs required.

The new system was created in such a way that is not restricted to just footwear. It can manage any products with endless multiple sized items. The heading on all screens/reports all dynamically change depending upon which product group the product belongs to and reflects the sizes for that particular style/product group.

The application uses complex SQL views to produce visual NetPlus forms that present the subform data in nested sub-tables which are often a mixture of both horizontal and vertical at the same time.

Information from Moda in Pelle's 50 separate shops is uploaded to the main server every night and this data is automatically updated and fed back to the shops.

The outcome

The benefits gained by moving to NetPlus and commissioning Sapphire to help with the conversion have been enormous. Moda in Pelle has gained a lot more control of their business systems and have also improved the integrity of their existing data. They can now report far more comprehensively than before and have increased their productivity with the introduction of barcode readers, eliminating their previous manual input processes.

Moda in Pelle has recently commissioned Sapphire to create further modules within their core system.