About AMT Coffee
AMT Coffee engaged with Charterhouse to help implement a document management system to streamline their processes, improve their information security whilst saving time. Find out how they reduced their business costs in this case study.
AMT Coffee is a UK chain of coffee houses that are mainly located in railway stations and hospitals.
It was founded in 1993 by Alistair McCallum Toppin and his two brothers Angus and Alan. Their first shop opened in Oxford city centre. AMT was the first coffee company in the UK to use 100% Fairtrade coffee and 100% organic milk.
The Challenge
AMT Coffee has 52 coffee bars and they each deal with their own financial paperwork, banking and till receipts and reporting. All this paperwork was transported to the head office in Knightsbridge where it was unpacked, sorted, processed and then archived. The transportation and archiving of all of this information was insecure and costly.
AMT Coffee engaged with Charterhouse to help implement a document management system which would help them streamline their processes, improve their information security whilst saving time and reducing the associated costs.
The Solution
Charterhouse conducted a process audit to fully understand where improvements could be applied to enhance AMT’s internal operations to address their challenges.
The first phase of the project focused on finance where Charterhouse deployed an invoice processing and approval workflow system. This enabled AMT finance staff to automatically extract data from incoming finance documents such as supplier invoices reducing the time historically spent on data entry and eliminating the chance of human error.
The objective of the second phase of the project was to reduce the time and remove the costs associated with transporting the documents from each coffee bar to the head office.
They were then able to route this document around the organisation for appropriate validation and approval in a digital format. Charterhouse built integration between AMT’s existing financial software and their new cloud-based document management system which meant that all of the information collated as part of the approval process was automatically transferred into their accounts software.
This ensured that no document could be accidentally entered, processed and paid more than once. It also removes the need to input the data into multiple systems.
“We were impressed by the project team at Charterhouse who understood our business needs and were able to deploy a suitable system to address them. Our new document management system is easy to use and feedback from the wider business has been positiveIT Manager, AMT Coffee
The objective of the second phase of the project was to reduce the time and remove the costs associated with transporting the documents from each coffee bar to the head office.
Charterhouse began this phase by visiting multiple AMT coffee bars to find out what information each bar needed to send to the head office and how it was collated. This research enabled Charterhouse to define the method by which each coffee bar could submit the required information digitally without the need the need to print, copy or post anything.
This included digitally ingesting point of sale reports directly into the document management system so that each coffee bar no longer needed to print and reconcile any daily till reports and then share them with head office.
Benefits
This project had multiple benefits addressing AMT’s key challenges as defined in the scoping phase. In addition to this there were numerous other benefits which came to light once the system was
implemented.
- Save £24,000 annual postage costs from budget
- Time spent on manual data entry and repetitive tasks reduced by 43%
- Automatically extracts data from documents
- Defines company procedure and policies with a full audit trail
- Head office have real-time overview of business processes and cash-flow
- Risk of losing or misfiling documents greatly reduced
- Enabled agile and remote workers to access the system and engage in the processes from any location
- Eliminate human error from manual data entry and approval of invoices
- Creates an instant Disaster Recovery system by hosting both processes and document in the cloud
- Identified financial discrepancies and fraudulent invoices more quickly
