INTRODUCTION
Ibex Industries (IBEX) specializes in the design, development and supply of equipment and consumables for use in the Meat Processing industry. As a global company, IBEX operates from three locations; New Zealand (Head Office), Australia (sales office) and Brazil (sales Office) with all transactional accounting at the sales offices, and management accounts for the Group via the head office.
THE CHALLENGE
After many years of happily using Sage Pastel Partner, IBEX experienced massive growth within the business. Partner simply could no longer tick all the boxes, and IBEX management knew that any change was going to be met with resistance as the staff was very dependent on Partner and knew the package well. That was one of the reasons why there was such a long delay in changing systems and also why IBEX kept the upgraded software within the same vendor stable and migrated to Sage Pastel Evolution.
Ray Connor, General Manager at IBEX says: “With our new sales office opening in Brazil, we needed to have the opportunity to utilize multiple description listings for all products to allow invoicing from the English speaking head office, in the local currency, and in Portuguese”.
THE SOLUTION
Some of the main features of Evolution that influenced the purchasing decision is BOM (Bill of Materials) and Multi Warehousing modules, the ability to operate and manage the accounting function of a satellite office (in a foreign currency), and being able to easily consolidate accounts from multiple operations/countries. Furthermore, the ability to have multi lingual descriptions also satisfied the criteria.
The BIC module (Business Intelligence Centre) with its automated, consolidated reporting from multiple sources is beneficial, and Trew Solutions have assisted in the development of some very detailed reports that would normally take many hours to compile – resulting in a substantial monthly saving of man hours.
“While the out the box software was perfectly suited to our needs we were able to have customizations made by Trew Solutions to the system to configure it to be exactly right for IBEX. We were able to easily customize numerous forms so that our professional image was maintained” said Connor.
THE RESULTS
Whilst the delivery schedule was compact, the scoping, needs analysis set up and training were well co-ordinated and professionally done by Trew Solutions and well managed internally by IBEX’s product champion, resulting in a project that was delivered on time and on budget. Connor feels that “it is a solution for our business for today and tomorrow – and with this in mind, it will grow with our business better than any of the other solutions we reviewed in our decision making process. We are now able to have far more data in one central point, all integrated and we have 1 system that does everything we require with relative ease making management assessments and decisions a lot easier.”