Hercules Tsoutsas bought Jaggards in July 2016. After years of being immersed in technologically sophisticated corporate and financial environments, it didn’t take Hercules long to focus on the best way to improve his new acquisition’s business system.
However, the business had used MYOB, Outlook and Retail Maker to run its processes for a decade, and was still relying on manual data entry. So while the company was incredibly well-established and respected, its underlying business systems urgently needed an overhaul.
“Everything was fractured and independent,” says Hercules. “Nothing was truly integrated, so the systems basically didn’t talk to one another. The Retail Maker system only looked after sales and inventory and MYOB, the accountancy system, was completely separate. The business was using the calendar function of Outlook to schedule in payments and handle timesheets. Information had to be manually copied over from one system to the other, and this created a potentially higher margin for error. Just keeping the data up to date was incredibly time-consuming and expensive.”
“The biggest issue was that the software hadn’t been updated for a long time,” says Hercules. “It was so old that it was extremely difficult to extract data from it — and this impacted on everything. It really was just too far gone to be saved.”