Client Stories

Client Stories > Business and Professional Services > L W Cole

L W Cole have specialised in installing appliances for the UK House building community for over twenty years. Since its inception in 1944, L W Cole has been synonymous with service. Working with house builders such as Redrow, Taylor Wimpey, Bovis and Barratt as well as manufacturers such as Electrolux, BSH and Whirlpool, their priority has always been satisfying and pleasing the customer.

Birmingham based L W Cole provide appliance supply and installation facilities to all of the UK’s largest housebuilders. With the new operational capacity delivered by new technology systems and recognising their position in the market the future business strategy is to offer a wider range of services to the industry.

L W Cole contacted Freeman Clarke when they realised their current IT systems were not supporting their projected growth. As a result, David Beck from the Freeman Clarke West Midlands team was appointed to work with the Management team at L W Cole.

David’s initial task was to conduct a review and to resolve challenges with the existing IT systems which were poorly performing and impacting the business. The systems were ageing and it was clear the current suite of business applications could not deliver to the ambitions of the business.

A new IT support partner appointed and immediate actions taken to stabilise the platform and implement immediate changes to improve how the business used its technology.

“It is fair to say that at the time our IT was simply functioning rather than delivering value and the IT partner was working on a purely reactive basis. With the immediate changes David implemented we saw immediate benefits and had a helpful and proactive IT partner that could work with us” – Henry Shaw, Managing Director

David’s next step was to create an IT strategy for the business which included moving multiple services to cloud and establishing the requirements for a new ERP system. David oversaw the requirement and procurement process for the new business wide ERP solution and helped the team manage the transition to a much more efficient and functional system than previously, including the migration of current data resulting in no operational downtime during the transition.

“Throughout his time David has shown consistently that he can handle any change or requirement we need, even our last minute change to another accounting solution was managed and delivered with no drama whatsoever. I no longer concern myself with IT and can focus purely on the business knowing we have systems in place that can handle all of our growth plans.”  – Henry Shaw, Managing Director

The next phase of the strategy is to deliver higher resilience and flexibility in the technology used through the delivery of more service based applications ensuring which enable the technology to support and deliver to the business plan.

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Freeman Clarke is the UK’s largest and most experienced team of part-time (we call it “fractional”) IT leaders. We work exclusively with ambitious organisations and we frequently help our clients use IT to beat their competition.