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Ugly
Mug Coffee –
Customer Case Study
Another ACCTivate!
Success!
 Ugly Mug Coffee (uglymugcoffee.com),
of Memphis, Tennessee is a growing and
fun-loving coffee company founded in 1998. While they love their coffee, they
are very serious about their business.
Over
two years ago Tim Burleson,
co-owner and CTO of Ugly Mug, went looking for a business and
operations management system to help support the company's growth. He also wanted to move their
operation away from manual systems such as spreadsheets so they could
better manage their customers, products and the overall flow of orders.
After
examining the software market for a year, Tim, who has a background in
software development, didn't see a small-business package powerful
enough for them. So, he decided
to have a package custom built.
After
they had already started this process, he found the ACCTivate! website
and discovered that a powerful small-business package does exist after
all. He dropped the custom
software development, purchased ACCTivate! and went live in February
2005.
Tim
concluded that ACCTivate! is not only more powerful than the system
they were about to build, but it is less expensive overall as
well. He said, "we're in the coffee business, not
the software development and support business." He added that it is also much easier
to have the professional staff at ACCTivate! support, release updates
and enhance the software as well.
Last year, Ugly Mug launched
Elvis Coffee (elviscoffee.com),
a line of Elvis-themed products that has been shipped to every state,
15 countries and can even be purchased at Graceland.
With
the help of ACCTivate!, this brand has turned into the largest
non-music venture licensed by Elvis Presley Enterprises. "We couldn't have done ElvisCoffee.com
without ACCTivate!," is the conclusion Tim made.
This
strong statement is a clear indication of the productivity and
organization gains that can be earned from successfully running
ACCTivate!.
During
the holidays last year, the Elvis
Coffee website received 4,000 orders in five days. These orders were imported into
ACCTivate! through the web order
import module and processed without a glitch.
An
average non-holiday week usually sees between 50 and 200 orders. During this busy week, Ugly Mug was
able to handle over 20 times the shipping volume of a typical busy week
and they attribute it to productivity gains from ACCTivate!.
One of these productivity gains is the ability to
process orders faster than before.
Tim also notes, "barcoding in ACCTivate! saves us at least an hour per day".
Ugly Mug has modified their order picking sheets
(through Crystal Reports) to include the order number both in
human-readable letters and barcode as well.
After the order is picked and ready to ship, the
order number is scanned into the shipping computer and through the shipping workstation interface
module all of the shipping information is populated instantly in their
shipping software.
Saving at least an hour per day calculates into real
savings in the long run. Week
after week this can add up to hundreds of hours and thousands of
dollars saved per year.
ACCTivate!
has allowed Ugly Mug to gain control of their business so they can
manage everything from inventory to a precise cost of goods sold. Before ACCTivate!, their business
processes were very manual with spreadsheets and printouts.
Now,
with ACCTivate! they track their inventory, review customer performance
and calculate cost of goods sold at a very granular level. They even calculate their coffee cost
in a given bag to a fraction of a pound, for example.
Ugly
Mug Coffee is a small business on the rise. They made a decision to invest in
their company when they chose ACCTivate! and that is an investment that
is paying off. Cheers!
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