Brightpearl Perks Up Prima Coffee After Going Live In
A Hot Minute

Every morning, millions of Americans wake up and count on a cup of coffee to kick start their day. 

In fact, it’s estimated that around 400 million mugs of joe are drunk every day in the US – sometimes at home, sometimes in cafes, sometimes on-the-go. 

It’s clear America’s love of coffee runs deep – and it’s something that coffee equipment brand, Prima Coffee, switched onto back in 2009. 

The Kentucky-based company’s top quality coffee kit – which includes grinders, filters and a huge selection of coffee machines – quickly proved popular with budding baristas and coffee shops alike. 

With a loyal following of commercial and consumer customers, and multiple sales channels that include several websites alongside Amazon, Discount Bandit and Facebook, Prima Coffee experienced rapid and impressive growth.

A bitter aftertaste

But the sweet smell of success came with a bitter aftertaste as the brand began to get weighed down by a multitude of manual processes and plagued by inaccurate inventory management. 

“The existing set up we had – which was based around Skuvault for inventory management plus lots of spreadsheets – was cumbersome and inefficient,” said Jordan Kavuma, Director of Marketing at Prima Coffee.

“We had major issues with accuracy on Skuvault. There were frequent glitches that needed manual workarounds. None of our systems were talking to each other – and it was impacting our customer service and holding us back. 

“We decided to overhaul the back and front ends of our business at the same time. We’d settled on BigCommerce for our new website, so we asked around for recommendations of a retail operations system that could integrate well with BigCommerce – and Brightpearl’s name kept coming up.  

“When we realised the platform does so much more than OMS, inventory management tools or ERPs, as well as deploying quickly and integrating instantly, signing up was a no brainer.”

Brewing success

Traditional ERP Netsuite was also initially in the running – but was quickly ruled out by the team for being “too clunky and expensive.”

The typical ERP can take anywhere from 12-24 months to set up, and, sadly, 50% – 75% of ERP implementations end up failing. 

Meanwhile, Brightpearl implementation has a 97% success rate, with most customers going live in 120 days or less. In the case of Prima Coffee, implementation was even quicker, at just 90 days.

“We were clear from the start that we had to go live on Brightpearl in time for our holiday season – we trusted the Brightpearl team to make it happen, and they did,” said Mike Miller, Data Manager at Prima Coffee.

“As promised, Brightpearl integrated seamlessly with BigCommerce from the word go and instantly gave us a centralized hub where we could see realtime data across all our sales channels. It means we can quickly make better decisions.”

The beauty of Brightpearl is that it’s purpose-built for retail – so it’s got all the features fast-growing businesses need. These include warehouse management, demand planning, CRM and accounting software. 

However, one of the most game-changing features for most Brightpearl customers – including Prima Coffee – is Brightpearl’s Automation Engine. This powerful feature saves the average customer two months every year by making it easy to automate time-consuming manual processes.

Automatic pick-me-up

“Before Brightpearl, we were getting bogged down by repetitive manual tasks and spending all our time dealing with inefficiencies,” added Jordan. 

“As well as the great inventory management features, Brightpearl’s Automation Engine has been a game changer for us. It’s helped us speed up our order processing by around 50%. 

“Automation on Brightpearl has given us back the freedom to innovate and focus on our ideas for growing the business. The ideas were always there – we just never had the time to work on them, until now!”

“The implementation was super smooth and we quickly saw the benefits of using the platform.”- Jordan Kavuma, Director of Marketing, Prima Coffee

Brightpearl prides itself on its market-leading open API approach – which means the feature-rich platform can grow as businesses like Prima Coffee do, with new features and functionality developed and added all the time alongside a pre-built suite of integrations.

This means brands like Prima Coffee can count on Brightpearl as a future-proof solution. 

Jordan said: “We’ve got plans to expand into new markets and to open new sales channels, such as eBay. We’re also working on a new consulting service for cafes, which we’re really excited about. 

“Our entire business is run on Brightpearl and we’re confident the platform will be part of our long term success.”