The firm has over 5,000 employees, largely based in Bradford, West Yorkshire, with the remainder of the workforce in a further ten distribution sites across the country. Grattan plc is the UK's third largest mail order company, with an annual turnover in excess of 600 million and 7.5 per cent of the market. Anthony King, Senior Program Analyst at Grattan plc, describes the role that network technology plays in supporting the company's business today and explains how Grattan is using Novell solutions to lay the foundations for business growth into the future. Our customers select items from a catalogue and then telephone their orders in to our Bradford call centre. Orders are processed on the Mainframe systems, which control the supply and distribution of products requested by the customer.
Information is of paramount importance at every stage of our business processes.
In any week we receive 380,000 calls from our customers and despatch 600,000 articles. Novell's SAA gives integration between mainframe and distributed network allowing MIS data from all parts of the company to be sent back to head office. The Novell products used on the network play a key part in the handling of company internal processes, such as human resources data and management information. Over the years we have been moving more of these key business processes over to electronic media. Over the last couple of decades we have built up a network across the company to connect together the various steps of our business processes, ranging from Mainframe order processing to sharing mission critical information quickly and efficiently.