Real Asset Management is first choice at Plymouth & South West Co-operative Society Ltd

Plymouth & South West Co-operative Society Ltd, Devon’s largest independent retailer, has selected RAM’s fixed asset management solution as part of a comprehensive systems review, designed to improve efficiency as well as providing a solid foundation for future development.

The Society’s range of activities includes food stores, Homemaker (non-food) stores, funeral services and hairdressing salons and is one of Devon’s largest employers with over 2,000 staff and a turnover of £121 million. It trades in every area of the community, from small rural villages to inner city areas and has been in existence since 1860.

Amongst the 96 stores, the Society is responsible for over 7000 assets and has traditionally used internally designed systems to manage this process. However, due to the growth in the Society, the need to modernise financial systems was paramount. The desire to improve the accuracy and efficiency of asset management prompted the finance team to look for a company to provide the solution. “The in-house solution we used was sufficient to carry out the basics of fixed asset accounting”, explained Chris Rowe, management accountant at the Co-operative. “What we needed though, was a more accessible application that could improve the efficiency of the department and enable the finance staff to extract data of real analytical value.

“One the most important factors to us when selecting new software was to acquire it from a company who would share in our forward thinking strategy whilst proven to be a well-established supplier”, continued Chris Rowe, “one which would be able to not only deliver the goods but also work with us to develop the system in the future. Real Asset Management was chosen because of its position as the market leader and its reputation amongst other businesses in our industry. What appealed to me was its ease of use and the potential of its functionality. It was real future-proof software that we could use to develop the business and interface with any new financial system.”

“Reports can even be emailed directly to individual stores, which will help us to answer queries and reconcile data quickly”

The Society has just gone live with the new RAM solution after running it along side its previous system for the past few months. “One of the first things I noticed was the improvement to the speed of input,” recalled Chris Rowe. “Moving around the screens is so much quicker and locating an asset is far easier than before.”

“I am also delighted with the level of detail that can be reported on. The team can now run reports at store, department, cost centre and even project group level.

All these elements are essential to us as we move the Society forward and we can now offer a very detailed level of financial management. These factors will also have an affect on the number of man hours spent managing assets. As the process is now up to twice as quick, I estimate that we will save approximately 4 hours per month. Reports can even be emailed directly to individual stores, which will help us to answer queries and reconcile data quickly. Consequently, the time-saving aspect will certainly reduce costs.”

“The system has also enabled us to improve the validity of the data. A number of revaluations have already been processed to increase accuracy and any mis-keyed data is easily identified. We can even trace individual assets acquired during store refurbishment programmes to check against budgets.”

The finance team at the Society is using RAM’s system to manage assets such as investment property, IT equipment, shop fittings, vehicles and epos for over 140 individual cost centres and plan to utilise the full functionality of the software in the future. “Not only has RAM fulfilled our current requirements but is has given us the flexibility to develop our asset management function” concluded Chris Rowe. “Just to start with, we plan to create parent/child assets, apply flexible relife options and forecast future asset spend.”