James Burden acquires Kentas with support of NI tech

A local retail tech firm has played a major part in an acquisition by UK wholesale giant James Burden.

In November, the Smithfield Market-based poultry, meat and game wholesaler successfully acquired catering food and drink supplier, Kentas of London, for £6 million.

The acquisition will extend the range of cooked meats and delicatessen products supplied into catering and retail businesses throughout London and the south.

However, much of the success of James Burden has been underpinned by software written in Portadown.

Datos Professional Solutions Ltd has been working with James Burden for just over 16 years, with the wholesaler recently upgrading to the tech firm’s latest Windows-based package, Season.

Datos said that since implementing the package, the wholesale giant had grown exponentially, leading to last month’s acquisition.

Season is used in the company’s Smithfield Market business, and also manages its Newcastle Depot.

“They run our full system, including our financial ledgers for the business’ accounts, all written here in Portadown,” explained Datos marketing executive, Chris Butler.

He said the Season package also runs James Burden’s order entry programme, which allows them to produce invoices with correct pricing and costs for suppliers.

“They heavily use our built-in sales reports including the gross margin report, allowing them to see profit percentages with added filters to pinpoint exact information,” he said. “The trend analysis report allows them to identify trends in their sales over a given time period, and that also comes with really useful filters including identifying customers who haven’t bought within a given time frame. That’s vital for such a competitive industry.

“Finally, the comparative report allows them to view information such as the best and worst performing products or customers, and allows for comparisons of things like sales per month. All this helps the business grow as it aides effective decision-making and allows them to view both their strengths and weaknesses within the business.”

James Burden also recently adopted Datos’ telesales module for the purpose of the Kentas acquisition.

“This will allow their sales team to complete their daily sales calls efficiently and all monitored so the company can measure the effectiveness of their ongoing sales methods,” he added.

Datos is now in its 25th year, and its package Season is also used by over 100 sites in UK and Ireland, including Seafood Holdings (Bidvest), the UK’s largest Seafood Supplier; and Heaney Meats, Ireland’s largest catering butcher.

James Burden started out using Datos’ initial software package COMiT, which was written in pre-Windows computing language, DOS.

“The team here at Datos support these companies on a daily basis as well as writing the features which has brought them success,” Chris said. “We are all immensely proud that we have created a system that is proven to grow businesses and bring success even in the face of a faltering economy.”

For more information on Season or Datos, visit www.datos.co.uk.