Interflora is the world’s largest flower delivery network with 58,000 florists serving customers in 140 countries. A significant proportion of its business is done during just three key periods, Valentine’s Day, Mothering Sunday and Christmas.

It prides itself on being able to get bouquets to their recipients on the right day. It used not to have to bother very much about either who its customers were or even which florists generated the most business as the Interflora network was once virtually the only option for people in the UK to send flowers at a distance.

But the competitive landscape has changed and even supermarkets have entered the flower relay market.This has led to price erosion and intense competition for Interflora’s 1,800 UK member florists.

Interflora has three main sales channels: Interflora florists through a central contact centre; on the web at www.interflora.co.uk, which is now the main choice. Whichever channel is used, orders are processed centrally and systems reliability is critical.

With so much of the business concentrated into three short periods it needed an automated system capable of processing up to 100,000 transactions per day. The organisation knew that its existing architecture, involving member florists in manual dial-up and dial-back connections, was causing delays in getting orders for flowers processed.

To expand its business and to meet customer expectations Interflora had to change its order processing applications and enabling infrastructure.

Mike Heath, Interflora head of support, says: “To meet market demand for flowers within hours we needed to move order information much more quickly between our central systems and member florists.”

Interflora selected the Oracle 11i e-business application, which could be tailored to meet its precise requirements, as the core of its new systems.The accelerated information flow across the new network means member florists’ screens are now updated virtually in real time.

This is a key enabler for a more responsive and timely flower delivery service, providing a platform for Interflora to grow its revenues in the highly competitive flower market.

The business benefit has seen Interflora delivering sustained revenue growth that surpassed expectations, despite aggressive competition.

Meanwhile the in-built security and resilience of the network and hosting solution is safeguarding business continuity. Interflora has had no downtime since the solution was deployed.

The Interflora-hosted solution provides for round-the-clock proactive monitoring and support with a hosting environment comprising Sun 480, 880 and 1280 database and application servers loaded with the Oracle 11i e-business application together with two servers for testing, development and back-up.