Coupland’s Bakeries

Infinity’s reliability and flexibility help keep Coupland’s customers coming back

“Inventory management is so important to us - we deal with many thousands of dollars of fresh goods every day. It’s essential that we stock each of our 25 stores with the right fresh products daily to make sure our customers are offered the products they want, and to avoid excess stock loss. Infinity helps us get the balance right across the country.”

Lindsay Sutcliffe, Chief Information Officer

Coupland’s Bakeries is one of the largest independently owned bakery chains in New Zealand.

They’ve got shops throughout the South Island and have been expanding into the North Island. Living up to the motto ‘The Home of Good Baking’ since 1970, the Coupland’s team has a ‘great quality products need not cost the earth’ approach that delights Kiwi families every day.

Coupland’s and Infinity began their partnership more than 15 years ago when CIO Lindsay Sutcliffe was looking for a new POS system for the expanding company. Over the years, Infinity has responded to Coupland’s needs and now provides inventory management, rules-based pricing, conditional receipt footers and ever-reliable point of sale tills to the company’s 25 stores.

There are a number of Infinity solutions meeting Coupland’s requirements

“Fifteen years ago, we were much smaller and had a POS system that couldn’t fit the bill. As we grew, we needed a platform to expand our retail base,” says Lindsay.

“We employed Triquestra and their Infinity platform and it’s worked really well for us ever since, especially around scalability.”

Coupland’s new store in Rolleston under construction

Inventory management

For a company like Coupland’s, where freshness is so important, Infinity inventory management provides an integral link between manufacturing and happy customers.

“As you go into a store during the day to buy a product, we watch those sales so we know what to bake and deliver tomorrow,” comments Lindsay.

This live data drives what Coupland’s makes every day.

Infinity integrates with other systems which is very valuable feature for Lindsay.

“Infinity is the repository for all our product, stock and financial information and we use SAP Business Objects for analytics. That’s because we also manufacture for large and small wholesale customers throughout New Zealand and need different reporting information for that side of the business.”

Point of sale

Lindsay explains that when setting up new stores, the point of sale aspect is always easy.

“We just tell the Infinity team that we’ve got another site, with X checkout lanes and it’s really straightforward.”

Coupland’s checkout operators range in their technical knowledge but no one has any trouble with Infinity. After a day of till, product and customer service training, new staff are up and running. Even when items are sold in different ways - for instance a mince pie can be sold as frozen, chilled or hot and have a different price for each format. Infinity makes it easy to select the correct price look-up code.

Lindsay also appreciates how Infinity lets you assign different levels of access and data visibility to different staff, depending on whether they’re an operator, a supervisor or a store manager.

Rules-based pricing

The latest addition to Coupland’s Infinity platform is rules-based pricing.

“We want our marketing department to have more tools in their promotions toolbox and rules-based pricing will give them that sophistication,” explains Lindsay.

It’s especially useful when it comes to combos and promotions with related and unrelated items. For example, Coupland’s can offer a lunchtime combo of a sandwich, slice and drink for a fixed price and give the customer a number of choices for all three items. Neither the operator or customer has to work out any prices or whether it’s ok to mix item A with drink B and slice C. Lindsay says,

“Rules-based pricing will let us offer customers better deals and keep the tills moving.”

Personalised advertising and promotion

Lindsay is quick to point out Triquestra’s ability to meet Coupland’s demand for new functionality.

“They’ve always been very receptive to our requests. We asked for conditional receipt footers and they made it happen. It’s a good upsell tool. If a customer buys a budget bread, we can print a voucher on their receipt offering money off a premium bread on their next visit. We also run promotions on the till display screens. Triquestra installed this for us many years before the supermarkets started doing it. It works really well and looks great.”

Gardens at Coupland's Christchurch production facility

The results

For Coupland’s Bakeries, one of Infinity’s greatest benefits is how it helps drive customer behaviour and profitability.

“We follow bakery and lunchtime trends in the UK and Australia and want our technology to put us at the forefront here in New Zealand. Our data visibility lets us meet demand for different products all over the country and ensure freshness even at our more remote locations. We can spot buying trend, stock level and loss patterns, and then act accordingly,” says Lindsay.

Speed through the checkout is another Infinity advantage. Coupland’s does have rush times during the day and must keep people moving. Infinity is very quick to operate and integrates with Coupland’s EFTPOS system really well so there’s no delay.

Regarding reliability, Lindsay couldn’t be happier.

“We have 25 remote sites that range from two to six tills. Whenever we have review meetings with Triquestra, the first question is 'Have we had any issues?' and I can't remember the last time we had an outage. It’s a very solid product that works for us 7 days a week, 12 hours a day.”

Lindsay recommends Infinity to any retailer looking for a responsive, reliable unified commerce platform that can handle complex sales, enable excellent customer service, and offer outstanding data visibility for confident forecasting.

He concludes,

“I’ve always been impressed with Triquestra’s strategic planning for the Infinity platform. They’ve got a good, stable structure with a consistent team. As we’re still expanding, we’re sure of Infinity’s ability to match everything that our larger scale operation needs.”