Take Control, Scale Faster, and Grow Profitably

Pet food manufacturer selects SAP Business One to increase efficiency and add value to pet owners.

About

Armitage Pet Care provides premium food and treats for pets of all shapes and sizes. It works with some of the UK and Europe’s leading retailers including Sainsbury, Tesco, Pets at Home and Amazon. Its Good Boy dog treats brand has experienced particularly strong sales performance, with 22 million treats sold in 2018.

In 2017 the pet food business was acquired by private equity player Rutland Partners.

The Challenge

Armitage Pet Care is going through a period of transformation that has included significant investment in capability and infrastructure that will allow it to continue to expand and develop growth from future opportunities.

However, its incumbent technology system was nearly 30 years old and was no longer able to support the business; it could not provision new software or integrate with the firms’ partners and suppliers’ SAP systems. As well as an outdated IT system, legacy knowledge about processes among its workforce needed to be captured and transferred.

The Solution

Armitage selected SAP Business One on SAP HANA to support its efficient and dependable service to customers and pet owners. The solution is integrated into the firm’s sales, procurement and manufacturing processes and deployed on Codestone’s securely hosted SAP Business One as-a-Service platform.

In spite of lockdown challenges, go live went ahead on 1st June. Project planning and implementation was made easier in many ways by having less staff on site due to social distancing. Instead, meetings took place on Teams and a virtual floorwalker enabled staff to log questions and track progress.

The browser-based scanner application Codescan WMS will improve stock handling and automate stock management, decreasing the risk for human error from manually inputting data. With Armitage aligned to SAP, integration and functionality will be extended to third parties providing potential for further growth opportunities.

Rama selected SAP Business One, Boyum’s B1 Usability Package, Business Process Automation (BPA) and Codescan for warehouse operations.

About

Based in London, the family-owned Rama Carpets has grown since 1965 to become a leading supplier of rugs and carpets in the UK, with a reputation for high quality and service.

Rama offers a comprehensive range of hand-woven, hand tufted and power loomed rugs & carpets meeting the demands of an ever-changing market. Its partnership with Nourison USA enables it to offer its customers a large selection of programmed area rug and broadloom carpet collections.

The Challenge

Rama had outgrown its previous business support systems, which required significant manual effort by its users to carry out simple tasks such as entering customer orders.

Approximately 300 orders a day were manually entered to spreadsheets, with the associated data keying error risks.

There was little integration of Rama’s internal systems with customers’ infrastructure, preventing Rama from taking advantage of electronic data exchange, such as sales order automation or e-invoicing.

Business functions operated in silos, with low levels of integration between sales, purchasing, finance, and warehouse functions.

To maintain service levels and achieve its growth targets, Rama needed an integrated, well-supported ERP system that would provide a platform for savings and growth.

The Solution

Rama selected SAP Business One, Boyum’s B1 Usability Package, Business Process Automation (BPA) and Codescan for warehouse operations. The solution was chosen as Rama required a system that would enable them to automate incoming customer orders through NetEDI interfaces and alleviate pressure on its sales department. As a SAP Gold Partner with a reputation for helping organisations reach their full potential, Codestone was selected to manage the implementation.

Whilst the pre-existing system was manually intensive and prone to user data entry error, it supported a workable set of business processes, and these were used as the basis for design of the new system. This led to some complexities in configuring SAP and getting the implementation completed. Working closely together, the decision was taken to go live and operate the business using going forward SAP. Codestone has assisted Rama to develop ways of working that take advantage of the new solution’s capabilities.

Customer ordering is now integrated with Sales through NetEDI, allowing Rama’s commercial customers to place orders with them directly into SAP B1. The sales process is largely automated, with these orders driving warehouse and distribution activities, without the labour-intensive and error-prone processes previously in place. production orders, and inventory transfer requests, from the creation of pick lists up to packing items for shipment with delivery documents.

The reporting capabilities of SAP B1 are a significant step up from what was available previously, bringing real-time information to Rama’s decision making. Finance staff are now able to design their own queries to interrogate the database, replacing cumbersome SQL scripts.

SAP B1 brings benefits of an industry leading organisation, and with Codestone’s support, the business will be placed to gain from future releases of the software.

Rama is already planning to integrate SAP B1 with the organisation’s web site, which will enable customers to access its live stock system. Further automation is in the pipeline, extending the support warehouse functions to include automatic printing of despatch labels, driven by courier selection.

EMS wanted to effectively future proof its technology to support its average 10% annual growth target.

About

EMS is a leading distributor and manufacturer of high quality precision drive systems used extensively in medical, healthcare, agriculture, building automation and many other industries. With two locations in the UK it has one site for design and manufacturing and one for sales and order processing with administration and warehousing at both.

The Challenge

EMS had commissioned bespoke software that had suited the firm’s needs up to a point but as a legacy solution functionality was basic and not easy to make changes. Although both sites used the same software, they were not connected and updates had to be manually entered leaving scope for human error.

To support its average 10% annual growth targets EMS wanted to upgrade to a modern system that would provide everything it needed in one place and deliver a wider breadth of features and tools, effectively future proofing its technology.

“We needed to move away from the risk and reliance we had on our existing system which was supported by one individual”

The Solution

EMS selected SAP Business One over Microsoft Dynamics for its capability of delivering a single integrated ERP solution that would enable the firm to manage all its core business activities. The firm engaged Codestone to deliver and support SAP Business One which provides ERP functionality for stock management, invoicing and quotations and CRM project management for the field sales teams.

With SAP in place across the group, Utmost can now build a consolidated finance structure for compliance with regulatory reporting requirements.

About

Utmost Wealth Solutions is a leading specialist in life assurance and capital redemption bonds for high net worth UK residents. Based in the Isle of Man, Ireland and Guernsey it manages more than £27.9bn assets for over 136,000 clients. Utmost has a clear focus on being the leader in the creation of sophisticated wealth solutions for the international mass affluent, high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth markets.

The Challenge

Utmost’s previous finance system in the Isle of Man needed to be upgraded to support the planned growth of the business. The acquisition of two existing Codestone customers, both operating SAP Business One (B1) as their back-office platform, provided Utmost with the opportunity to rationalise and update its systems. The aim was to help streamline business functions, create group wide efficiencies and create flexible group-wide reporting capability.

Although several implementation partners were considered, the wider Utmost Group’s experience of working with Codestone made it the natural choice for the implementation.

The Solution

The solution comprises SAP B1 for finance and SAP Concur for expense and invoice processing, together with Business Process Automation (BPA) to integrate back office systems. The business intelligence suite BI360 from Solver Inc. was also selected to support reporting requirements.

The project provided an opportunity for Utmost to design a solution that would support its high-volume, journal-based business. Codestone supported the additional customisation required to ensure a comprehensive solution was delivered.

To obtain early benefits, SAP Concur went live first, supporting invoice and expense claims processing. A manual interface was put in place to the existing systems prior to completing the SAP B1 implementation. “The solution is now embedded in the business. Paperless processing of invoices and expenses provides significant improvements in efficiency and more compliance with corporate policies such as approval limits,” explains Charlotte Barham, Head of Finance at Utmost Wealth Solutions. “Production and despatch of sales invoices is much easier out of SAP; invoices are clearer, and we have better visibility of what we have billed for our services. We are now looking at the potential for rolling this out to other areas of the business that generate invoices.”

Interfaces to back office systems have been significantly improved using BPA. Volumes were limited to 18,000 records per file in the previous system. Now with SAP B1, there is no limit on the data volumes and batch runs can be scheduled overnight, preparing the business for each start of day.

Utmost now handles transactions in many currencies and up-to-date exchange rates are critical to its operations. SAP B1 now provides rapid upload of rates from market sources.