Contracts with retailers all over the globe have made a success of Coventry-based IT consultancy PCMS, which is one of the world’s leading independent suppliers of IT services and software.

PCMS – founded by computer programmer Richard Smith, 64, and his wife Brenda, 65, in 1982 – supplies its retail software to Unipart, Waitrose, Prada, Boots, Marks and Spencer and Samantha Cameron’s Smythsons of Bond Street, to name just some of the big names in PCMS’s customer portfolio.

PCMS has also helped drive the UK expansion of US gourmet doughnut chain Krispy Kreme. PCMS provided the company’s technological infrastructure.

All of which is good news for PCMS which has its headquarters on the Westwood Business Park in Coventry, as well as offices in Huntingdon. Its international reach includes a North American subsidiary in Cincinnati, as well as operations or distributors in Argentina, Mexico, Italy, Australia, South Africa and around the Pacific Rim. The company is estimated to be worth at least £80 million. In 2010 it posted profits of £8 million on £40.2 million sales, and net assets of £32 million.

The US operation returns around 30 per cent of the company’s total turnover.

Richard and Brenda Smith began PCMS in 1982. It started life supplying business applications, before concentrating on a number of industry sectors including automotive and aftermarket, construction and distribution.

But it is through its specialist retail systems that it has achieved significant success, with a strong balance sheet and low borrowings.

The company has picked up several accolades along the way and has been a finalist in the Deloitte Fast 50 a number of times as well as the Family Business Awards.

In the States PCMS recorded successes in the influential RIS News leaderboard – the bible for retail software – and was listed as one of the World’s Best Managed Service Providers in the MSPmentor global service report.