For almost 30 years, Thinc has worked with ERS to streamline its business operations, with a true sense of partnership and shared success.
Electronic Reading Systems (ERS) provides barcoding and labelling solutions to a client base covering industrial and commercial markets, healthcare and educational facilities, and more.
Established in 1988, the company’s roots are in providing hardware and software for automated data capture. These days, it covers an ever-expanding range of scanning and tracking technologies and services, from smart cards to RFID, and works with the industry’s biggest brands, even developing custom solutions.
We’ve been privileged to be at ERS’s side for nearly three decades. Working closely with Steve Ball, Managing Director, and Dave Hayzen, Head of Information and Communication Technologies, we’ve watched the company’s growth at close quarters, and seen our relationship develop into one of true partnership.
The main challenge for ERS has actually been an opportunity: growth. One of the major milestones in its story came in the 2000s, when the emergence of ecommerce brought new possibilities, taking many businesses from solely instore, telephone and mail-order ways of working to dealing with customers online.
As ERS evolved to this new reality, it needed new systems for ecommerce and CRM to accompany their ERP. But as business ramped up, so did the realisation that core functions such as sales, accounts and dispatch were being managed separately across these systems.
As the years have passed, and margins on every business have tightened, the need for streamlined, frictionless systems has only become more critical. Steve and Dave saw the risk early: managing multiple systems was an inefficiency timebomb. If an order was made on the website, someone in the team would also need to enter it into Sage.
When a further need emerged to upgrade how goods in and out were managed, they knew that a more sophisticated integration of their business tools was needed. Their thoughts turned to how they could eradicate this double-keying and simplify how data was managed across the business.
The solution began with a simple principle. Mulling over the problem over a Friday night pint, Steve and Dave landed on the 90:10 rule, which they abide by to this day. If they can improve 90% of their operations with automation, then the time saved allows them to pay attention to the more complex 10%.
With a clear idea of what they wanted to achieve, they called on Thinc to help make it happen. We worked closely with them to develop the internal systems and integrations that glue the different parts of the business together. And when the time came to migrate to Sage 200 in 2014, we ensured that all of its data, and the automated processes that had streamlined its management, were seamlessly carried over.
In the time we’ve worked with ERS, Steve and Dave have seen seismic shifts in their buyers’ habits, the rapid expansion of new technologies in the market, and even a global pandemic that changed how the world does business. They’ve ridden every wave, growing ERS from around £0.5m in annual turnover to £8m.
Thanks to smooth integration of its core systems, with Sage 200 key to their accounting, they have doubled the speed at which they can process orders. Every hour, data feeds from more than 15 Europe-wide distributers are managed centrally. But the numbers only tell part of the story.
The time we’ve worked together has enabled us at Thinc to build a genuine knowledge of what matters to ERS, and for ERS to be comfortable enough to trust Thinc to support its long-term growth. For Steve, this comes down to a shared vision and commitment to collaboration that each party brings to all of its working relationships.
“I think that the fundamental key element of why it’s worked so well for us is Thinc’s understanding of our business – they’ve been there and watched us grow,” says Steve. “They understand the way that we view at our critical data infrastructure. It’s very much a partnership.”
Indeed, this trust and understanding has enabled us to go beyond providing a service to ERS, and has resulted in us working together to bring ERS’s complementary expertise to Thinc’s client base. Having observed ERS’s capabilities in developing integrated solutions for data capture in the field or the warehouse, we trust them to help some our customers that are facing similar challenges.
“We’ve worked on a lot of these projects. It could be, for example, a simple picking system, where you need to transfer problem products to a different warehouse,” Dave explains.
“A lot of these systems are web service driven and need to be integrated into Sage 200, which is something we understand well. The integration tools we’ve put together bring it all into the reporting side of Sage 200. We normally hit a 95% accuracy on the first delivery.”
In every sense, then, it’s a true two-way relationship. We’re excited to work alongside ERS as it continues to grow, both in its scale and expertise.
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