“We’ve had to adult a diversion to offer incomparable customers—in partial by relocating to Microsoft 365. We’re now in a same joining as incomparable engineering or roasting firms. And … we’re good placed to contest during this level.”
– Josh Clarke, Head of Coffee, Clifton Coffee Roasters
Britain is famous as a republic of tea drinkers, though in a final 10 years, it’s depressed in adore with coffee, too. Brits splash 95 million cups a day, adult from 70 million usually 10 years ago. Innovative, eccentric coffee businesses like Clifton Coffee Roasters minister to this swell in popularity.
The Bristol, England–based association was founded in 2001 as a “support complement for coffee shops.” Back then, says Clifton Coffee’s Head of Coffee Josh Clarke, a attention had begun to change toward peculiarity though lacked imagination in training baristas, servicing coffee machinery, and sourcing beans—all of that Clifton Coffee straightforwardly provided.
Today, a association has grown to offer 850 indiscriminate business in a United Kingdom and mainland Europe. In a 4 years given Clarke assimilated Clifton Coffee, a staff has some-more than doubled from 12 to 27 people, though it’s still run by James Fisher, a initial director. Clifton Coffee offers not usually specialty coffee and machinery, though also servicing and training. The fortitude behind some of a nation’s many successful eccentric and sequence coffee shops, Clifton Coffee represents some-more of a value sequence than a supply chain, as Clarke puts it.
Where good coffee comes first
Twenty-four Clifton Coffee employees work during a categorical site in Bristol. They run a business, demeanour after finance, sequence coffee beans, run a roastery itself, and use and sell machinery. The association also has 3 remote locations portion business in Liverpool, west Wales, and on a south seashore of England.
As with any passion project, a people during Clifton Coffee come to work any day given they adore coffee. And this concentration on their core business meant that many of a support systems—like communications and partnership tools—got adopted on a fly as a association flourished. Clarke says, “As we grew, we combined new staff here and there to say a same turn of service. But we reached a vicious indicate in a expansion bend and started to remove a lot of conversations in a difficulty caused by regulating mixed communication tools. We knew we indispensable a combined proceed to hoop a expanding distance of a patron base.” Scaling to accommodate a final of incomparable business meant rethinking how a business operated.
Since 2017, Clarke and a co-worker have led a plan to make operations some-more fit both by organizational changes and smarter use of technology. This enclosed a new financial and craving apparatus formulation complement and a thought of going entirely paperless by mid-2019. An renovate of Clifton Coffee’s partnership and communication collection was a subsequent judicious step.
The span got in hold with Steve Crompton from Changing Social, a Microsoft Partner Network member that had suggested Clifton Coffee during a prior digital projects. “We told Steve about a communication problems, and he was vehement to uncover us Microsoft 365, quite Microsoft Teams and what it could do,” says Clarke, who was quick sole on a thought of one set of collection for everybody in a business to use on any device. “And we was assured that we could use Microsoft 365 to assistance keep a information safe,” he adds.
From 0 to live in dual months
The timing was perfect—Clifton Coffee’s subscription to a aged file-sharing use was regulating out. Following initial conversations in early Sep 2018, a association switched to Microsoft 365. The deployment quick progressed as Changing Social and Clifton Coffee built a structure of a Teams environment, and Clifton Coffee’s IT partner migrated a company’s earthy Exchange server to a cloud. Designated Clifton Coffee employees led a expostulate by assisting pierce everyone’s files to a new complement and finding new uses for Teams within a company. By Nov 5, Changing Social had transposed all of Clifton Coffee’s prior partnership and communication collection with Microsoft 365.
Cutting by a noise
With Changing Social’s support, Clifton Coffee could now adopt new ways of working. Clarke says, “With Teams, we immediately felt a impact of carrying channels where we get a quick response given your doubt is applicable to that channel rather than something that could get mislaid in a hulk organisation discuss on WhatsApp.” Now, many employees keep 3 windows open on their inclination to cover all they need: Outlook, Teams, and a company’s financial system.
In offer to regulating Teams to promulgate on both their laptops and smartphones, employees during Clifton Coffee use SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Forms to share files and media—and to ask leave, record expenses, and collect feedback on coffee trading. Clifton Coffee also gathers feedback from business about a training sessions, promulgation forms out automatically along with invoices, that is already assisting urge patron use levels.
The new collection have delivered discernible savings. Getting absolved of Dropbox has saved Clifton £2,500 alone, though a advantages go over carrying fewer program licenses. When Josh goes on trips to source coffee, he used to make tasting records on paper and share them with a website manager in chairman or around WhatsApp—a routine that would take around 30 minutes. Now, they share records around video in 10 minutes, saving 20 mins per coffee. And with 58 coffees to demeanour after, this works out during £1,000 they can put behind into a business.
Bespoke workflows for improved coffee
Clifton Coffee had some-more skeleton for a new tools, reaching over a initial potency gains. Within a integrate of weeks of Microsoft 365 going live, a association had already grown dual sparkling use cases. The initial concerned putting QR codes on any square of coffee appurtenance in a field. Previously, it kept all documentation—invoices, smoothness notes, quotations, engineering logs, and callout forms—on paper. Staff would imitation copies, fill them in while onsite, afterwards indicate them once behind in a bureau and save them on a server.
“It was an primitive routine of information government that left too most intensity for tellurian error,” says Clarke. Now, when engineers revisit a customer, they take a design of a formula with their device and a form pops adult in Microsoft Forms where they can enter a use data. This gets automatically saved in a cloud for anyone who needs to entrance it. And easy ways to record information outcome in higher-quality input. Clarke adds, “Having a some-more arguable record of appurtenance use means that we’ve been means to sell 30 percent some-more H2O filters given a pierce to Microsoft 365.”
Clifton Coffee has rolled out a identical complement in a roastery, where whoever opens adult in a morning needs to finish a checklist to approve with food reserve regulations. Now, that chairman usually takes a design of a QR code, logs a data, and gets on with a day. Clarke has worked out that these digitized checks save employees about one hour a week and broach offer assets of some-more than £500 any week by stealing inefficiencies and inaccuracies in a process.
Stepping adult to a large leagues
Clifton Coffee’s newly digitized business puts a association in a good place to pierce to a subsequent proviso of growth. After operative with a developer to emanate a bespoke operations package, it skeleton to exercise Microsoft Power BI for transparent insights into a business. Clarke says, “Some of a business have grown to 50 or 60 sites now. Over a past integrate of years, we’ve had to adult a diversion to offer incomparable customers—in partial by relocating to Microsoft 365. We’re now in a same joining as incomparable engineering or roasting firms. And given we offer both those aspects, we’re good placed to contest during this level.”
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