Lifestyle Appliances uses tech to manage lockdown surge

Outdoor leisure products retailer Lifestyle Appliances has used new software to deal with a surge in online sales during lockdown

In the past quarter, Lifestyle Appliances’ business has experienced growing online demand as customers started buying online during the lockdown period.

The company already used a range of Managed IT services from its tech partner of 12 years, OGL Computer, including IT Support, Office 365, Cloud Recovery and Proactive Administration, to manage business processes. But it was OGL Computer’s ERP software that helped Lifestyle Appliances manage the online spike in sales.

OGL’s integrated CRM, accounts and purchasing ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution combines data from all sales channels into one platform and by bringing together information from many different systems, Lifestyle Appliances was able to process orders more efficiently.

Track stock

Frank Spencer, Lifestyle Appliances director, said: “OGL Software really came to the fore as it enabled us to track stock movements quickly and keep our customers up to speed with the daily fluctuations in stock availability, so we could pass this accurate information on to our customer base.”

While OGL Computer’s Cloud Recovery solution gave Lifestyle Appliances’ peace of mind with automated off-site backups of its data, Office 365 supported the company’s flexible remote working environment. A small number of  staff utilised mobile VPN set ups to work from home and this enabled them to access the OGL platform real-time from a remote location to process sales orders and purchase orders.

This kept the flow of orders to be dispatched going into the warehouse so that delivery time promises for our internet customer base were maintained.