Continental Flowers Case Study

In business since 1974, Continental Flowers has grown to supply the US and Canada with more than thirty varieties of flowers from several countries in Central and South America.

Business Challenge
Continental Flowers was utilizing a proprietary DOS-based software solution that was cumbersome and quickly becoming obsolete. Growers Reports required expensive overtime hours to complete. Their system could not adequately handle their sales volume, the number of concurrent users, or allow them to access the information remotely. They needed to upgrade their financial solution to accelerate internal reporting, including supply chain management, financials, information management and billing. After performing a full analysis of their business requirements, Citrine concluded that, due to the unique requirements of their flower importing business, there was no existing solution that could address their needs.

Solution
Citrine developed Flower Power™ Software, a supply chain solution specifically tailored to the floral import/wholesale industry. The newly integrated Flower Power and Microsoft Great Plains solution running on a Microsoft SQL Server met all of their unique requirements and allowed extensive data analysis and advanced financial reporting. The Flower Power and Microsoft Great Plains solution has eliminated all the inefficiencies of their old system and provided them with new functionality for future growth.

Benefits

• Reduced administration costs.
• Grower’s Reports now take 50% less time to complete.
• Response time to client request are greatly improved due to the new search feature available for inventory.
• Ability to track sales information including market, salvage, promotional and standing orders in a report format or exported directly to Excel.
• Execute quick and accurate inventory checks utilizing a bar code interface.
• Improved tools for financial forecasting and analysis with drill down capabilities to the source documents.
• Scalable database platform using Microsoft SQL Server that will provide data analysis capabilities.