Metalube is a manufacturer of specialist lubricants to the non-ferrous wire, cable and tube industries. Established in 1988, based in Irlam, Manchester and employing around 20 people, Metalube generates 98% of sales through exporting to over 80 countries worldwide. They have subsidiary organisations across China, India and Brazil. Metalube focus on producing a premium product that improves their customers machine life and product quality.
Metalube favoured SAP B1 over an existing accounts package for their financials, an existing database for sales and purchasing, as well as an array of Word documents to record various information, because it offered a single database to increase the visibility within the company and a closer integration with their overseas subsidiaries. In addition, Financial Controller, Peter Linton states: “We wanted to have a more comprehensive understanding of what margins we were making on sales. SAP B1 would allow us to move onto a perpetual inventory system rather than month end stock counts– allowing us to track costs of batches produced and more accurately track the margin on individual sales.”
The implementation went ahead without any major issues states Peter, who goes on to say: “We had some fairly complex document requirements due to the fact we export chemicals to so many different countries. By utilising the Usability Pack, we were able to integrate some additional fields into our documents and the training on Crystal Reports allowed us to be able to tailor the document layouts ourselves, allowing us to be flexible and responsive when changes were required.”
Looking to the future Metalube plan to roll out the solution to their overseas subsidiaries and also incorporate the SAP Business One mobile solutions.
Some of the benefits Metalube expect to achieved with SAP Business One:
- More sophisticated costing model, improve decisions on what to produce and how to price it
- Improved planning processes, predict future stock levels, reduce over purchasing and avoid delays due to stock outages
- Quality of information, company wide access to real time business information
“Frontline are local to us and we were impressed by their professionalism, it was clear they were well resourced and had a lot of experience, ” concluded Peter Linton, Financial Controller.
