Established in 1946 in Birmingham, Cookes Furniture has grown to become one of the leading independent furniture retailers in the UK specialising in high quality designs from around the world. With a flagship store situated in the heart of Birmingham, a sister store in Christchurch, Dorset and a central Birmingham warehouse the company now employs over 100 employees across the three sites.

Cookes Furniture had used Sage business software for many years, relying upon its strong financial capabilities at the very core of its operations. However, due to the unique nature of the furniture business the company had also become reliant on small bespoke software developments that were becoming increasingly wieldy and costly to manage. Simon Richardson, IT Manager explains. “Despite our growth the company had still managed to maintain a small infrastructure at its core proving beneficial in our battle to keep costs down and remain as competitive as possible. However, costs from support of bespoke software were rising without any perceived additional benefits. So, we took the decision to start looking for a new system that was robust, feature-rich and future-proof.”

CPiO, recognising that Cooke’s current solution was no longer meeting its needs, decided to introduce Sage MMS (now Sage 200). Damien Convey of CPiO comments, “Sage MMS builds on all of the great functionality of Sage Line 50 but with the functionality and scalability that you really see in much bigger solutions. MMS is proving to be very popular with companies looking for a competitively priced system that can handle fairly complex commercial transactions. These companies are typically quite ambitious and want something that can grow with their businesses, whilst offering a faster return on their investment and a lower total cost of ownership.

Cookes Furniture quickly decided to settle on implementing Sage MMS with CPiO. “We liked the fact that the system was built on a .Net platform so we could take advantage of the latest technology offerings and the many third party solutions available. And the more I looked into the product the potential I could see within it. I firmly believe that MMS has the capability to handle many of the processes that we previously had to bespoke, which will inevitably drive down costs”, noted Simon Richardson. “Early calculations show a return on our investment within 2-3 years – something that I really didn’t anticipate until year 5.”