Our Clients & Projects 

Charles Ware Parts restores and sells Morris Minors. They are one of the premier Morris Minor experts in the UK and further afield. The previous ERP was struggling with some of the unique aspects of parts supplies and the integration with their online shop would continuously break meaning orders would often not flow through for stock management and stock figures were incorrect. To remedy this Rakata deployed Agri-ERP with our integration to a new state-of-the-art WooCommerce site. As a result, the stock is always up to date and orders flow through to Agri-ERP so customers’ orders are never missed.

DougHillard Sports is a Bristol Sports shop with a difference. Opened in 1967 by local Bristol Rovers legend Doug himself. Doug Hillard Sports is like no other Bristol sports shop, they have stock and products that you would struggle to find in any other sports shop in Bristol. Therefore they needed an online shop integrated with an EPOS to allow them to showcase these products to a wider audience. Rakata has deployed the e-commerce shop fully integrated with their EPOS to enable another 40 years of providing fantastic sports service.

Problem:  Unitary Engineering Services is a dynamic and growing engineering company that services thousands of customers over southwest England & Wales. They had been using an established Job Management tool for a number of years. However, over time the quality of service had started to degrade, paid-for developments and enhancements didn’t arrive or work as expected once they did and as the business was growing new functionality was needed to meet the needs of UES and this simply wasn’t available or likely to be in the future.

Solution: UES engaged with Rakata to deploy our SuiteCRM Job Management platform. We were able to meet all of their existing functionality whilst providing the enhancements and improvements they required. Now 20 engineers have a dedicated UES Andriod App on their tablets managing their complete day-to-day life. Management can now run accurate timesheet reports specific to their unique employee agreements. The CRM includes full vehicle tracking, full worksheet management including bespoke worksheets for the business as well as standard CP6, CP12 CD11 etc and others. The surveyors have full integration with their office 365 diaries and finally, the management reports actually meet the needs of the business rather than what the system can generate.

Problem: HM Bristol provides largescale temporary electrics to construction sites often operating over many months or even years. The problem occurs in the management of the job and the invoicing. HM Bristol might provide a quote for temporary electrics over 24 months but many of these electrical requirements might not be required for months. For example, if a 24-month deal was signed in April there might be a requirement to provide temporary lights for the dark winter months but these would not be required until October and then removed in April the following year. Therefore invoicing these specific lights at the right time against the quote is tricky. Questions such as “what have we quoted for?” and “what have we actually delivered yet?” then followed by “have we actually invoiced for that part yet?” were often heard. HM Bristol had tried in the past to deploy an application solution to meet this need but this turned out to be hugely tricky to configure and the application was so complex they needed an application expert just to manage it. That was abandoned and they returned to the tried and trusted way of expert employees who could run it manually!!!

Solution: We quickly realised that the only way this solution would work would be to take a Rakata CRM instance and map HM Bristol’s exact business process to the CRM functionality. No compromises or shortcuts. The result is a solution built exactly to their needs. They can now quote for a specific set of items and then deploy quantities of these over time. Employees can then quickly identify how many items were quoted for, how many have been deployed and how many are outstanding. They can also see who deployed, where and when. The systems also handle variation orders and extras so there is no discrepancy between the original contract and subsequent modifications.

Problem: MJT Controls are a large multi-site wholesaler of Boilers of Plumbing supplies. They had however grown the business using Sage Line 50 as their stock management,  accounts system and EPOS. This worked for a while but as the business has expanded including into other outlets SageLine 50 simply wasn’t up to it. Employees were experiencing huge system slowdowns, corrupted data and location issues. Sage Line 50 is simply not designed as a front-end multisite stock management system & EPOS. Frequent calls to Sage support often ended with comments such as you are pushing SageLine 50 beyond its capabilities.

Solution: Rakata deployed Agri-ERP into MJT Controls even though it wasn’t specifically designed for this market. Why? Agri-ERP provides all the functionality required and is far more friendly for employees to use than SageLine 50. Agri-ERP has been designed with a much more complex business process in mind – namely organic material. The need to handle all aspects of organic commodities results in a system that is able to easily meet the needs of static products. It is a lot easier to take a solution aimed a handling more complex processes and configuring it to meet easier business needs than take a tool designed for more simple requirements and try and adapt to do more complex tasks it wasn’t designed to do. Another key selling point was the fact that Agri-ERP is fully integrated with Sage Line 50. Therefore MJT Controls can continue to use Sage Line 50 as a backup, and not retrain their Account employees with another system.

Problem: Willetts has been operating for over 100 years and is one of the UK’s old Grain Merchants. Grain Management is a complex task and they had an old Grain Management system called Gold that no longer met their business needs. IT was on-premise needed expensive servers, was difficult to access when out of the office, was cumbersome to use, very expensive to licence and extremely expensive to maintain going forward. Willetts wanted to move to Xero as their accounting software however Gold was unable to integrate and would only work with their own in-house Accounting system which was deemed very expensive and didn’t meet all the functionality of Xero Accounting.

Solution: Rakata has deployed Agri-ERP as a fully cloud-based solution. Gone are the old cumbersome on-premise servers that are expensive and require huge capital investment to upgrade. Agri-ERP can be accessed on any PC/Laptop that has an internet connection. The solution is built for the internet age, all browser-based and fully integrated with Xero and Sage. The user experience is also hugely increased with a modern user interface. Willetts employees can now work from home with an improved operating environment all whilst reducing their system running costs by over 50%.

Problem: Reflections are one of the UK's largest Hairdressing Apprenticeship providers in the UK with over 500 students learning at any one time. With so many student applications managing this process was proving difficult, very manually intensive and prone to mistakes. There was no way to know how many students were in the application process and at what stage they were. Reflections also have many key learner software applications once a student is on a course and each one of the would need to be set up manually. If there was a system that could manage the entire end-to-end application process and then automatically manage the onboarding of student applications that value would be huge.

Solution: Rakata deployed our CRM to manage the application process. The complex and detailed application forms are now completely digital and online, the management of parent/guardian authorisation where required is completely automated and the integration into key applications is totally seamless. These applications include PICS, Active Directory, Moodle and others. Following the successful deployment of the CRM Rakata now manage the complete Technology landscape including all website hosting, and complete IT managed services for over 200 devices including servers, routers desktop & laptops across 3 sites and all associated applications.

One of the UK's largest lead generation companies with over 800 staff Pursuit marketing had an all too common patchy landscape of various systems including spreadsheets (of course!), small databases, SAAS tools and no single point source of the truth and extremely manual processes to try and manage it all. Rakata over an 8-month period has deployed SuiteCRM, tailored it to their needs and integrated specific value add tools such as customer portals, online forms, data imports, bespoke reporting and many more. That economic benefit to Pursuit is huge. SuiteCRM is open source so there is no licence cost meaning Rakata can support the CRM as a whole based on the number of users but not licensed per user. The saving when compared to comparable solutions such as MS Dynamics & Salesforce is huge and support much more tailored to their needs.

Problem: Comfeeds were using old manual processes to manage their day-to-day business. Unfortunately, a key employee left the company taking with them the majority of their knowledge and processing power to manage the routine activities. The management decided to deploy a solution that automated and managed these manual tasks and didn't involve any heavy upfront investment or deploy servers and hardware they would have to support.

Solution: Comfeeds LTD contacted Rakata Technology to deploy Agri-ERP. Agri-ERP now manages the complete end-to-end process for the business and the previously single points of failure have been eliminated with the easy-to-use interface. GrainLinks avoided upfront hardware costs or ongoing hardware support issues and simply pay a single monthly support cost for covering everything.

Problem:  Proten is a specialist property preservation company that as contractors and surveyors provide property preservation, protection and repair solutions. Managing a growing business with manual processes, however, was proving an ever-increasing problem. All processes were manual, tricky to manage and prone to costly errors. Proten like most companies managed with very knowledgeable people that were tricky to replace when they were not there, the odd Access database and of course excel spreadsheets. They wanted an integrated solution that managed customer enquiries, the survey booking process, the surveyor's diary, the subsequent survey documentation and integration with document management tools to move the survey documents around the business without having to engage with employees to do this task. The Proten management team knew there was not a product on the market that could do exactly what they needed. They had also witnessed numerous attempts with previous employers to implement off-the-shelf solutions which had ended up botched and partially working implementations or even complete failures.

Solution:  Rakata has deployed a customised SuiteCRM instance that manages the complete end-to-end process from the initial customer engagement to complete surveyor management. Customer engagement such as surveyor appointments are totally automated with Email and SMS automatically sent. Surveyors' appointments are totally integrated into their Office 365 diaries and every aspect of the survey can be managed from the CRM. Surveyors are informed of relevant documents and changes all via the CRM and their phones. The success of phase 1 has now been expanded to phase 2 which will be the full end-to-end management of the restoration work which often follows a successful survey of customer engagement. Following the success of the CRM Rakata now provide complete Technology support services including IT support to over 30 employees including servers, desktops/laptops, and applications over 3 sites spanning the entire country.

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