Interview with Ian McLeod, General Manager at Northern Diver International.

You used to manage the business with a DOS-based Sage Line 100 system. What lay behind the decision to move to Sage 200?

Sage Line 100 had served us well, but support was being withdrawn from the system. It wasn’t a forced move, though. Over time, as we became increasingly ambitious for the business and entered new markets, we recognised that we’d pushed Sage Line 100 to the limits and needed a more powerful system – a full Microsoft SQL Server based one – that could provide more comprehensive support. We were clear that any replacement would need to have the scope to handle our requirements at the time and to keep up with any future expansion.

Did you have any specific requirements for the new system?

We wanted to improve our reporting and also our warehouse management. In common with many businesses, we have to tread that difficult line between over-stocking, which is wasteful, and under-stocking, which creates the risk of not being able to fulfil a customer order. In the past, with our old system, we couldn’t rely on our stock figures with any real confidence, so tended to over-stock, just in case.

We’d always had an excellent rapport with our Datel account manager and we were happy to stay with Sage, too. So we took the decision to move forward to a 20-user Sage 200 based system, with Datel’s support. There’ll always be some problems with a transition of this nature, but we were impressed by Datel’s responsiveness in fixing any issues. They made it as painless as it could be.

Coming up to date, in what ways does your Sage 200 based system provide more support to the business?

Sage 200 gives us the essential information we need to run our business effectively. The reports designer is much better and enables us to produce reports tailored to our business. As a result, we’re now able to produce monthly reports on sales to our different target sectors and on the performance of our sales people.

Having easy access to up-to-date information helps us to build on what we do well and look at where to focus our attention and resources for the forthcoming period.

Read more on Northern Diver's experience of Sage 200 and Datel >

Contact Datel to speak to one of Datel's Sage 200 Consultants.