Interview with Adam Sharples,IT Director at Ultimate Products and Chris Waddington, the company’s Reports Developer.

The retail sector, in which many of your customers operate, is putting increased pressure on suppliers to deliver more at less cost. How do you respond to this challenge profitably?

AS: To meet customers’ expectations and maintain our strong position in the current climate, we constantly monitor our processes and our IT systems to improve efficiency at every stage.  Procuring products from the Far East is a complex, lengthy process, often taking up to six months. Shipping alone can take three weeks. If we fail to meet our commitments on volumes, specification or delivery times, we face financial penalties. This can severely hit both our profitability and service record.

Managing these long lead times – and the problems that arise along the way – is part and parcel of our day-to-day work and we look to our IT systems to support us.

In 2005, you began the move from Sage Line 100. What prompted the search for an alternative IT solution?

AS: Against a backdrop of rapid growth, we wanted to drive improvements in our procurement, reporting and customer relationship management capabilities.

Deciding to stay within the Sage fold, we chose a more powerful, wide-ranging solution in Sage Line 500. We selected Datel as our new Sage Business Partner to supply, implement and support the system. We’d been impressed by their professionalism and willingness to customise the solution to our needs – qualities, incidentally, which we offer our own customers.

The migration was really a complete re-implementation; all that we used of Sage Line 100 was some of the data. We trusted Datel with this major transition and the solution went live in summer 2006.

How has the system moulded to the business since then?

CW: A significant milestone was extending the system’s capabilities with an important piece of software for the procurement side – Datel’s FUSION Enhancer. Our business is unique in many ways and FUSION Enhancer gives us additional fields on top of the predefined set within Sage Line 500. We can easily record and report on detailed, additional information, around products, sales orders, purchase orders... anything we need.

Now, just the sheer fact of having all the data in one location improves our efficiency. We now have a single point of reference centralised repository that slots into Sage Line 500 where we can post all information and pull off reports.

AS: We participated in the beta testing programme and Chris worked closely with the Datel development team. As we had an urgent need for its capabilities, we took a small risk by using it in our live environment. We certainly pushed the software to the limit and it performed well!

CW: Datel were particularly accommodating in developing FUSION Enhancer to meet our requirements. We asked for extra functionality to enable us to run alerts to highlight any emerging problems and quickly trigger the appropriate corrective action.

AS: That’s a good point. I’ve worked with IT suppliers in the past, and some adopt a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude. Datel went beyond their original spec, to help us.

What day-to-day business benefits have you experienced?