Sports firm boosts performance with SAP upgrade

Unicorn Products gains from enhanced MRP and EDI capabilities

Unicorn is home to brands such as Gunn and Moore, the cricket specialist

Sports manufacturer and distributor Unicorn Products has upgraded its SAP software to speed up processes and make better use of material requirement planning (MRP) and electronic data interchange (EDI).

The company, home of brands such as Gunn and Moore cricket products and Unicorn darts products, has spent around £80,000 to upgrade from SAP R3 to SAP ECC6. The upgrade comes more than a decade after the company’s previous installation of SAP software.

“We first got our SAP software in 1999, when we replaced legacy systems,” explained Edward Lowy, managing director at Unicorn Products.

“That version of SAP had been good for us, but over time, the demands on the business changed. We needed to have quicker information and be able to communicate via EDI with more people. It became time to upgrade.”

He added that the SAP upgrade was not a matter of course, as the company was also attracted by software-as-a-service solution NetSuite.

“We were pretty impressed by that; a lot of the sales order processing was very good, but when it came down to nuts and bolts, things like MRP for organising procurement and balancing supply with demand, we didn’t feel it had the strength to do what we needed it to do,” said Lowy.

“Software can be one of those things that you get really frustrated with and think: let’s throw it out and get something new in. But then you actually sit back, think about it, look at what you’ve got and think: hang on, this has been running our business for the last eight or nine years and it may not be the prettiest, but goodness, it’s done a pretty good job.”

The company felt that the investment made in 1999 was well spent and it was more sensible to build on that rather than replace it with something different.

Unicorn has also carried out a hardware upgrade, replacing its old Dell servers with new ones. Lowy said that upgrading hardware and software together improved efficiency as processes ran much quicker as a result.

“Data analysis and programs that ran overnight like batch updates, pretty much run instantaneously [with the new hardward and software]. Reports that used to take 20 minutes using the previous version of SAP, run in about one minute,” he said.

While Lowy revealed that the upgrade cost Unicorn £80,000, he admitted the company has little idea what return on investment it will get.

“Sometimes you can’t measure things by saying spend this today and get this back tomorrow. IT is a fundamental part of a company’s infrastructure. When we were looking at the upgrade it wasn’t a question of working out a straight return on investment, it’s about giving our people better tools and support that allows them to better serve our customers,” he said.

“Our ability to provide our customers with better customer service was very important, so we didn’t do a formal justification on return on investment.”