Calypso Soft Drinks has a new electronic data interchange (EDI) system to improve the speed and reliability of communications with trading partners.

More than 80 per cent of orders are now sent to the soft drinks brand electronically, and requests are received within seconds instead of minutes.

Calypso IT director James Holmes said: "EDI is a necessity in our business, but we installed our old system 11 years ago and it relied on a 56K dial-up modem which was slow and unreliable.

"Two or three orders took 15 minutes to come through, whereas now they are taken directly via a secure internet connection for processing."

The key benefit is no longer having to rely so heavily on IT support, says Holmes.

"The business closes over Christmas and before we had to have an IT person on site because of the unreliability of our previous system," he said.

"Our new one just sits and purrs in the background as the connection is constantly up if the internet is up."

Calypso's EDI technology is from supplier Inovis.