Thomas Ridley Foodservice

Thomas Ridley Foodservice is an independent business providing a trusted and flexible solution for professionals in the kitchen. They provide a multi-temperature delivery service to the catering industry throughout East Anglia and North London, including ambient, chilled and frozen food, and catering sundries. Since their initial investment in our Accord system nearly 30 years ago, they have continued to ‘sweat the software assets’ in order to further improve efficiencies and maintain their competitive edge. 

Hugh Godfrey, Managing Director, considers Accord a brilliant system which has allowed the company to “improve procedures, reduce operating costs, maximise sales, streamline stock control and improve customer service and management decision making. It gave us back control of our business and in so doing saved us thousands of pounds.”

Investments
Firstly, a modern Windows based network infrastructure was implemented to replace an inflexible and restrictive Workgroup network. The new architecture is easy to manage and expand, highly secure and reliable. It gives Thomas Ridley Foodservice a host of new functionality, including flexible and secure Email and Internet access to all PCs on the network. This new infrastructure was implemented over the course of a weekend with minimum disruption to normal trading. 

Secondly, a new telesales system was installed to provide Thomas Ridley with a more proactive and intuitive approach to outbound marketing. Accord Telesales has a powerful combination of features that is proven to improve efficiency, grow turnover and improve customer service.

Benefits from the new Telesales system have come through immediately for Thomas Ridley, in terms of improved customer service and enhanced levels of information available to their telesales operators, all of whom have adopted it quickly, finding it easy and intuitive to use.

The Results
Justin Godfrey, Director at Thomas Ridley, has said “The main objectives of our latest investment were to reduce costs, improve efficiency, grow turnover and, most importantly, to improve the service offered to our customers. It’s still very early days, but we are delighted with the improvements we’ve seen so far.”

Since the implementation of the original Accord system, Thomas Ridley Foodservice has grown from a £15m turnover company with 85 employees, to a £25m operation with over 120 employees, servicing 3000 customers. Hugh Godfrey believes that Accord has played an important part in their growth and will continue to contribute significantly in the future. He explains “BCP have a clear understanding of our business and the market in which we operate; Accord delivers powerful functionality critical to success in the foodservice sector.”