Pleasance House Consulting - Background
History
Pleasance House Consulting (PHC) was formed by Allan Wilkie in 2000. Its aim is to provide clients with world-class systems consultancy at extremely competitive rates. Target customers were originally multiple retailers with at least a dozen outlets and turnover in excess of £25,000,000 per annum. In 2009 the ‘Managed Services’ business model was launched, extending the target market to any stock-handling business turning over £100,000 per annum.
Allan Wilkie has over thirty years of experience in developing and
implementing systems in a wide variety of retail environments. His first eleven
years of employment were with a typically "tight-fisted" Scottish
supermarket operator who relied mainly on operational cost control for
survival. Contrast this with his heavy involvement in a project for the second
largest retailer in the world (as it was then), during
his second eleven year employment – this time with a retail systems software
house. Kmart were spending mega-bucks setting up a completely green-field
retailing operation in
For the last two years of that second employment, Allan was selling retail
systems into the UK market, so he has a sound knowledge of it - and a deep
understanding of the problems (and opportunities) faced by UK retailers in all
sectors. There are few
Pleasance House Consulting is not restricted to projects within the
A couple of major PHC client-projects have been completed to date. A "data cleansing" operation was performed on the legacy systems in Texstyle World and two completely new systems were selected/designed, implemented and integrated. One of them was a package solution for Merchandise Planning and the other a "hand-knitted" Management Information System. Bill Laughlin, IT Director of Texstyle World said "It is a pleasure working with someone who comes in, understands the business and its requirements immediately, and just gets the job done."
The MIS was subsequently packaged and sold to Klick Photopoint on a fixed-price basis. Additionally, several other projects were undertaken for Klick – a new merchandising system was implemented, warehousing and transport procedures and schedules were substantially improved and the flow of merchandise for Christmas 2004 was managed successfully using the principles of the PHC Seasonal Stock Manager. Over 5 years many interesting projects were completed in central merchandising and warehousing. Finally, in 2008 Allan project-managed the implementation of hand-held wireless devices in the Klick warehouse.
2009 saw the introduction of Managed Services as a credit-crunching answer to the problems smaller retailers have in making capital available for quality systems. Initially only the PHC Management Information System is available under this business model.
The Future
Pleasance House Consulting is looking forward to involvement in many more exciting projects. Ideally these would involve the introduction of a new management information system or "data warehouse" feeding from a state-of-the-art merchandising system. This is therefore the main focus of PHC marketing, but there are other products and services available and any decent-sized retail systems job will be considered.
PHC was formed as a "one-man-band" but an extended team can be brought together quickly (as in the Klick Photopoint project) to deliver more functionality in a shorter time scale. Allan Wilkie has an impressive set of contacts in the retail systems industry and relishes the opportunity to bring together "auld acquaintances" for suitably demanding retail systems projects. No multiple retailer's project can be too small or too large for at least initial consideration by (and of) Pleasance House Consulting.
In particular, there is a push to increase the Managed Services side of the business. Hopefully the number of clients for the management information system will grow fairly quickly. The longer term plan is to extend the concept to include full central merchandising system functionality for the retail clients and also to provide managed stock and materials control systems for non-retailers.
