Angling Direct recently completed an upgrade project from E10 to Kinetic with the help of CBO. We sat down with Richard Burt (Head of Projects) and Colin Heinen (Head of IT) to get the full lo-down on reasons for upgrading, how the project went, and what it was like to work with CBO.
First of all, tell me about Angling Direct. Tell us about the history of the business and give us an idea of your day-to-day processes.
Angling Direct is the UK’s largest fishing retailer. Our company principally sells fishing tackle products and related products through a network of retail stores located in the UK and Europe, as well as online via our websites.
We operate a main distribution center here in Norfolk that distributes online orders and replenishes our retail stores for the UK. As well as a separate European distribution center in the Netherlands for our European operation.
We use Epicor ERP primarily to control our business processes, such as handling orders, stock and inventory as well as managing our financials. We are not a manufacturing business so use the software to handle everything else and give us visibility of what we’re doing day to day.
Why was it time to upgrade from E10 to Kinetic?
Our business had seen amazing growth but some of our systems hadn’t scaled at the same rate, so we needed a system that could handle the increased demands.
Our primary reason for upgrading was to move to new infrastructure. We wanted to migrate our system away from on-premise hardware and embrace cloud computing to give us the flexibility to scale further and build more resilient systems for the long term.
What we’ve done with Epicor up to now has worked well in facilitating growth but with an ever-expanding portfolio of retail stores and more transactions to support it was clear we needed to upgrade as well as migrate to the latest version of Epicor Kinetic.
Another crucial factor for us was storage and server capacity, with the continued growth the original system designs for computing and storage were close to being exceeded, we had also reached a bottleneck for storage capacity amongst other things.
So you had a clear need for more storage. How did you decide on the correct path going forward?
We had expertise in migrating workloads to cloud computing with good success and preferred the flexibility that cloud computing could offer over buying more hardware but had little experience with migrating or performing Epicor upgrades.
We reached out to look for an Epicor partner to help us and were put in touch with CBO.
They suggested an upgrade path and the structure of how to undertake such a project combining both an upgrade of Epicor 10 to Kinetic as well as migrating to new infrastructure, so combining both requirements from our side into one project.
The consultants that were then assigned to our project had a wealth of knowledge in key areas of our upgrade journey that gave us great confidence in completing the upgrade successfully.
We had a small technical team our end working on the project in conjunction with CBO consultants, whenever we hit an issue or needed specific knowledge in particular areas of Epicor such as Service Connect, Financial processes or assistance with customisations they were able to line up a specialist at reasonable notice to keep our project moving.
We had some reservations about the amount of first-hand Epicor experience we had in house. The team would be responsible not just for moving to Kinetic, but also to cloud infrastructure, which was a big piece of work considering the lack of first-hand Epicor experience.
Thankfully, that’s where CBO stepped in to really help. Since we were all relatively new to Epicor, we needed somebody to steer the ship for us in terms of technical knowledge.
The prospective partner had to communicate what we could and couldn’t do with the software, what the pain points would be and where we needed to allocate our time and resources to get the most value out of the project.
Between chats with Neil Holdsworth and eventually David Riley, the CBO team helped us come up with a plan that would allow us to manage the internal customisations and some of the legacy processes.
This allowed CBO to help us with some of the bigger challenges and the upgrade itself that we obviously had only limited knowledge of. In short then, the project was born out of a need for the software infrastructure to keep pace with our business’ rapid growth.
We knew we had to do something soon, but rather than settling for a straightforward upgrade to the next version, we decided to be proactive and go a step further in order to reduce the need for further projects like this in the future.
Why did you select CBO?
CBO were among several partners recommended to us but we wanted a partner to understand our business and reassure us that they could handle the number of customisations that we had from within the previous system.
Thankfully CBO had the experience both with cloud infrastructure and the level of customisations that was needed.
They offered to arrange a scope of work, and to figure out the amount of time and resources needed from both sides and then came up with a budget.
It was a great pitch from Neil Holdsworth and he understood our needs very clearly.
CBO have experienced people in key areas like finance, technical and Service Connect. Knowing they’d worked with the product for 10 years or more meant they could really fill the gaps when needed. It really was so useful to be able to rely on them.
How did the project work out?
We always said that we’d split the project into two phases. The first phase would be about getting Kinetic up and running, new infrastructure, getting it migrated and upgraded, and anything that didn’t work, get it working with the least disruption possible,
The second phase would be more about improvements. Looking at our existing workflows and business processes and questioning how we could to them differently, how could they be more efficient and what features now that we’re running Kinetic can we apply?
That second piece of work is still ongoing. We have the system working well but we know we’ve only just scratched the surface of what Kinetic can offer us as a business.
Were there any specific requirements and did any challenges occur during the project?
The main thing was understanding our quirks, understanding our legacy and being able to get up to speed with how our business worked rapidly.
Experience was also key. Knowing CBO had a lot of experience from a range of customers meant they could therefore navigate problems with ease.
For example, we’d gotten quite far into the upgrade and quite a way into testing when we hit a few technical snags that we’d not encountered before.
Luckily the technical specialists we had from CBO didn’t bat an eyelid. That wasn’t a problem at all. They were able to pivot and deal with those things for us with little disruption.
In a way, the pressure was on us to keep up with you guys because we’re a small team!
The biggest challenge for us internally was in getting the expertise within the business to test effectively and keep pace with the project.
What were the most impressive aspects of CBO handling the upgrade?
I think just the fact that we delivered what we said we were delivering in quite a short time with a small team is thanks to CBO’s help, I think that is the key thing to get across for us.
Everybody has an idea about how a software upgrade should go, but the way CBO managed the project with conference room testing, pre and post upgrade steps and the testing methodology you shared with us really helped.
Ultimately its because of this regimented upgrade schedule and process that we had such a smooth upgrade experience.
Communication was always clear and ownership was clearly outlined from the off.
We had regular meetings with David who kept things on track, and, and when we needed help, he got the resources from within CBO to deliver it.
All in all, having the CBO team on hand and being able to ask them questions and get things back in minutes, saved us days and days of investigation to find out how things work in some cases!
The actual upgrade of our system when it came to our go live weekend required less than 48 hours downtime from a complete stop in Epicor 10 to fulfilling orders in a brand new Epicor Kinetic environment.
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