Premiere Products updates ERP to improve forecasting

British manufacturer Premiere Products is set to go live in early 2012 with a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to help the business improve its forecasting capabilities.

The company, which makes cleaning equipment and chemicals, is currently migrating from a bespoke business software package to IFS Applications and is on target to meet its go-live date of April 2012.

The new system will improve the firm's ability to forecast demand, said Richard Cox, IT director at Premiere Products.

“Much of the forecasting we do today is based on people's experience,” he told Computing.

“But with markets changing and given the economic climate, you can't always rely on experience. We need to be able to understand our data.”

Once the migration project is complete, Premiere will deploy modules to enable the firm to handle orders via its web site and to introduce business intelligence tools and management dashboards.

The implementation project represents a major IT project for the firm, which has been using its current green screen technology for the best part of two decades, but Cox doesn't see it purely as an IT project.

“Our primary focus is to understand what the business needs – and then to provide a service to help deliver on that,” he said.

Premiere Products chose IFS ahead of its competitors because its products were best able to cope with its slightly unusual business model – being both a process and discrete manufacturer as well as selling third-party products – while needing minimal customisation.

“The one thing we've had to change is how we define a customer,” said Cox.

“This seemed like a big change at the outset. We'd traditionally defined a customer by delivery address. But as we've progressed, it seems less and less of a big step, especially as it has allowed us to integrate our financial and customer relationship management systems.”