Swinton Electro-Plating (Lancs.) Ltd (SEP) has signed with Information Engineering for a five-user installation of the SYSPRO system.  The system went live in December 2003.

Metal finishers specialising in hard chrome plating, SEP has been delivering chrome and nickel-plating services to a wide range of industries for over 30 years.  Its main customers are in the offshore oil & gas industry and include Mono Pumps, Halliburton and Schlumberger.  It also serves the hydraulics, textiles and paper, plastics, engineering and electronics industries.  SEP, which turns over £2 million per annum and employs 50 people, is part of the Dorset Industries group of companies.

In May of 2003, with support for their existing Sage ERP system being withdrawn, SEP approached two ERP suppliers, including Information Engineering, to put together a solution to compare with the proposed Sage upgrade. The objectives were twofold: to improve on-time delivery performance and enhance customer service levels.

Godfrey Evans, Managing Director of SEP: "What we wanted to do was eliminate as many of our manual processes as possible.  The amount of time it takes to raise works and sales orders has been prohibitive, purely because we have to enter them from scratch each time." 

Until now, there's been no link between SEP's original quotation, sales order and final invoice.  With up to 50 quotations a month, it sometimes meant they carried out more work than they charged for.  The new system will address that and also allows them to extract standard financial and sales analysis reports for greater visibility of what's going on in the business.

Says Evans: "We chose Information Engineering because we were very impressed with their demonstration of the SYSPRO system and what it could do for us, and because they showed a real understanding of our business."

www.ieg.co.uk