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St. James’s Place Wealth Management, a FTSE 100 company, was struggling with managing their financial crime prevention cases. They were using a combination of Excel spreadsheets and email to manage their case workload. The case data was spread across multiple spreadsheets, making it difficult to find critical information. The manual process of logging and tracking cases was inefficient and prone to errors. The team had limited ability to control access to sensitive information, which was not ideal for storing the sensitive information found in financial crime cases. The team needed to pull Management Information (MI) and reports based on the data in their spreadsheets, which was time-consuming, subject to human error, and resulted in inconsistencies.

Fuba Printed Circuits Tunisie SA (Fuba) is one of the largest and most technologically advanced producers of double-sided, plated, through-hole and multi-layer printed circuit boards (PCBs). As a fast-growing manufacturer of PCBs, Fuba found it increasingly difficult to keep up with a growing flow of orders and production using only spreadsheets and manual processes. They needed an integrated system to bring business information together. The company was also looking for a system that could link production with engineering and support the implementation of best practices.

Michael Angelo’s Gourmet Foods, a leading manufacturer of premium frozen foods and refrigerated products, operates on a just-in-time production methodology, ensuring that fresh ingredients are received and products are cooked, packaged and shipped to customers within 24 hours. However, the company faced challenges in maintaining this process due to its rapid growth through sales and acquisitions, and the need to compete effectively in meeting the consumer-driven demand for low-carbohydrate prepared foods. The company needed to improve its inventory management, visibility into production data, and more effectively manage all aspects of its growing business, including the acquisition of a new facility.

Hammond Group, a global specialty chemical company, was facing challenges with its existing ERP and CRM systems. The company was dealing with lengthy implementation times, growing overhead costs, and continuous battles with vendors. The company had initially turned to tier one suppliers of Ross ERP to handle their financial operations and a large CRM vendor to handle customer care. However, the long implementation time, growing overhead costs, and continuous battles with vendors led them to look for alternatives. They had two unsuccessful CRM system migrations and even had to sue for damages in one case.

Berner Food & Beverage, a leading private-label manufacturer of premium, processed cheese sauces, spreads and toppings, faced several challenges. As a food manufacturer, Berner needed to meet evolving regulatory and customer requirements for food safety and quality. Increased scrutiny from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other government agencies necessitated a proven system to ensure compliance with numerous different regulations, such as the Bioterrorism Act of 2002. In addition, the company needed a broad-reaching technology infrastructure with the flexibility to help the company enter new markets, such as consumer packaged goods, all while supporting Berner’s lean manufacturing practices. As a private-label manufacturer, Berner constantly battles tight margins, necessitating maximum efficiency, visibility and productivity in its manufacturing operations.

Gehl’s Guernsey Farms, a leader in specialized aseptic food products, faced challenges in communication and integration between different departments within its 230-person headquarters. The company's growth led to stretched resources and the need for additional support to keep up with customer needs. Information within one department was often not visible to the rest of the organization, leading to inefficiencies. The inventory tracking system experienced frequent shutdowns, requiring significant time from the IT manager to keep it running. Gehl’s lacked an enterprise system with sophisticated reporting technology to support its growing business lines and overall expansion. The company also needed a system to comply with emerging technology standards. Without a company-wide inventory management solution, Gehl’s was forced to conduct manual physical inventory, which became increasingly time-consuming as the company added new product lines.

Dreco Incorporated, a manufacturer of injection molded plastic parts, was struggling with an outdated ERP system that was not designed to account for sales orders in real time or effectively manage data on prospective sales. The system required constant updates and was not user-friendly. Dreco needed a software solution that could handle the unique requirements of a plastics processor, including accounting for parts weighing as little as a few grams. The company also wanted a system that could seamlessly integrate all its business operations.

Tek Pak, a manufacturer of packaging for the electronics industry, was struggling with its bar code data collection system for shop floor reporting and inventory. The system was not interactive and provided no feedback, leading to errors, missing and incomplete transactions, and a general disinterest among the workforce. The reporting was not reliable, and the data was often a day behind, making it of no real value. Material usage was logged only once per week by supervisors based on hand-written notes from operators, so material issues went generally unnoticed until it was too late. Inventory accuracy and visibility were lacking.

The Phoenix Group, a conglomerate of three businesses servicing manufacturing and retail companies worldwide, was struggling with an outdated, manual system for managing orders. Orders were taken on paper forms and entered into spreadsheets, leading to multiple data entries, errors, and significant delays. The company needed an integrated system to deliver up-to-date information to improve the decision-making process. The Phoenix Group also needed a system that could manage its diverse products and services across 15 remote facilities and provide a web solution for remote users and customers.

Vita Health Products, a leading manufacturer of natural health products and OTC medications in Canada, was struggling with its aging AS/400 system that could not meet the company's growing business demands. The company was having difficulty maintaining inventory control, keeping product on the customer's shelf, and managing cost inputs. Without forecasting capabilities, Vita Health was forced to carry more product inventory, thus increasing carrying costs and the potential for waste. The company was also suffering serious customer service problems and losing a substantial amount of business. The lack of a real MRP environment meant that forecast demands and work orders were determined and managed primarily through an extensive manual analysis via spreadsheet. This was time-consuming and costly, and it was clear that the company needed to make a change from 'business as usual'.

Reading Bakery Systems, a company that designs and builds processing lines for snack products, was facing several challenges. The company was relying on home-grown programs that were unable to provide the information and control needed for effective operation and growth. The company's old business system lacked the necessary functionalities to run the business, leading to the development of their own procedures and programs to address these deficiencies. The new system needed to include scheduling functionality capable of tracking complex production jobs, as well as multi-job projects, keeping all activities coordinated and properly scheduled. Costing and financial management also needed to recognize both individual jobs and entire projects for proper control and accounting. Given the need to engineer, build and test lines, planning and scheduling were also critically important requirements. Reading needed a fully indented bill of material (BOM) as part of an integrated CAD and ERP system. Moreover, when scheduling and releasing jobs and sub-jobs to production, Reading wanted to flatten the BOMs. This challenging combination of requirements would all need to be a part of the system Reading ultimately chose.

In 2012, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the UK announced that it would hand over its powers to a new regulatory body in the Financial Sector - the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). With stricter regulations surrounding complaints management on the way, RSA used the opportunity to overhaul their Customer Relations function. The goal was to make RSA the market leader within complaints handling by restructuring the teams involved, changing the accepted norms and giving their staff the right software to get the job done. RSA implemented what was known as The Complaints Handling Integration Project (CHIP), a full scale review of RSA’s complaints handling at a root and branch level. This consisted of three separate parts: People, Processes and Technology. While reviewing people and processes, RSA re-designed how they handled complaints to comply with the new regulations, and also to comply with their own internal best practice system.

Boston Centerless, an industry leader in supplying precision ground bar materials and grinding services, was using an outdated custom application based on the Pick database and operating system. The software lacked the analytical features needed in today's manufacturing environment and support for the software was very limited. The company also faced challenges with the manual preparation of complex specification documents and needed to reduce the lead time for processing orders.

San Antonio Lighthouse for the Blind (SALB), a not-for-profit company providing employment to individuals who are blind, faced a significant challenge when sudden changes in market conditions threatened the loss of as much as 60 percent of their business. This forced them to move quickly to find new distribution channels to reach their customer base. Additionally, to stay competitive, they had an urgent need to reduce order-to-shipping time for their core products. In light of the changing competitive environment, time was of the essence. SALB knew the implementation of an ERP system would help them turn around products and services to customers at the speed they required and keep SALB in the ballgame.

Northland Fishing Tackle, a leading producer of premium quality fishing gear, was facing challenges with its distribution system. The company's supply chain was not fully integrated and the information they needed to make decisions was not readily available. They realized that in order to maintain their growth they needed an integrated back-end supply chain management system that was as great as their front-end products. They were looking for a system that had proven the ability to provide a fast ROI for their customers so that Northland could quickly see the benefits of upgrading their supply chain software. More specifically, they wanted better tracking of both their sales and expenses in order to better understand how the company was performing. They sought to be able to track both sales and expenses by customer, product, and salesperson. On the inventory side they wanted a better way to manage and track their SKUs and inventory costs to get a better gauge of their true costs and total inventory counts.

AXA Insurance, one of the largest insurers in the UK, was facing challenges in managing customer feedback. The company was receiving approximately 1,200 complaints per month across various business units. They needed a reliable system to manage this feedback and use the data for the operational benefit of the company. The company wanted to adhere to its internal service level targets, which included a turnaround time for acknowledgment of complaints within 24 hours. They also wanted to track the resolution of complaints at the 20 or 40-day point to see how many have been resolved within the target period.

Essex County Council (Essex CC) had been using the Respond system from Aptean since 2008 to manage inbound enquiries and complaints. However, as technology and the council's own processes evolved, the older version of Respond was struggling to meet the council's needs. The council needed greater clarity in reporting on the data within Respond, which the earlier version was struggling to support. A lack of Business Intelligence (BI) made it difficult for Essex CC to find root causes of issues and to take preventive action on them across the council. The council also had a requirement to publicly report on statutory complaints data, which was difficult to extract using the earlier version of Respond. The reporting process overall was a very manual one, including running different reports and then merging them outside of the system. The council also identified inefficiencies in the Quality Assurance (QA) process, which was manual and time-consuming, and left ample room for error. The council needed a simple interface which would display a user’s progress, as well as allow them to choose from a longer list of enquiry or complaint types that could be updated when needed.

Temple Street Children’s University Hospital, an acute Paediatric Hospital, was facing challenges in managing risk and promoting quality and safety within the hospital environment. The hospital's Risk Management Department had a broad remit dealing with issues ranging from standard patient queries, complaints and compliments to clinical and non-clinical indemnity liability cases. The hospital aimed to empower all staff to assume responsibility for contributing to effective risk management by reporting adverse incidents and complaints in order to improve the quality of patient care. However, the manual processes associated with incident reporting and logging complaints or requests for information were inefficient and time-consuming.

Litehouse Foods, a leading manufacturer of refrigerated salad dressings, cheeses, dips, sauces, cider, and freeze dried herbs, was operating under a paper-based system across their four production facilities. They were monitoring and recording metrics like downtime manually. Their existing system of record made the creation of reports difficult and offered little real-time visibility, causing them to overlook a substantial amount of downtime. At the time, Lithouse had over 400 downtime codes per line and an impression that they were operating at a much higher utilization and OEE than they actually were. It was this manual process that drove them to seek out a solution that would eliminate the need for paper, while simultaneously providing opportunities to optimize performance and eliminate errors.

Yale/Chase had some very specific challenges to solve with a new ERP solution. The primary need was to make sure that they could manage parts, sales, services and rentals in one system. On the rental side of their business, they needed a better view on their equipment availability tree so that they could better optimize booking schedules. On the services side, they wanted to make sure they could engage their technicians and get back accurate data and reports. They also needed to decrease the manual effort associated with stocking parts for consignment and service vans. From an operations perspective, they wanted to do a better job of optimizing preventative maintenance. Finally, they wanted to roll up their KPI’s so that the finance and leadership team had better insight into the performance of the whole business.

Equipment Depot, a trusted brand in material handling equipment since 1951, consists of five different independent operating companies located throughout North America. Each operating company has a different product mix and its own unique approach to its market. Its parent company, Pon Holdings of North America, had merged the operations of the five different business units under the Equipment Depot brand and started to work towards standardization of the business tools and processes used at each of them. Central to that effort was their plan to adopt a new ERP platform. They needed a software system that could handle the complexity of their operations. Replacing the software that runs an entire business is not an insignificant challenge. This is made more difficult when a company is replacing multiple vendor offerings and homegrown tools in one shot. Equipment Depot wanted to make sure whatever system they adopted was going to be future-proofed and based on a trusted brand in software.

Cardinal Carryor had been using a Unix-based software called MTA since 1978. However, the software company dropped support and subsequently went out of business. The legacy software wasn’t good at extracting information, making reporting difficult. The company needed a new software solution that could provide robust analytics and reporting capabilities. The employees liked the ease of use of the current software, but the lack of an audit trail and difficulty in understanding what was happening in the software made it necessary for a change.

British Airways Holidays (BAH) was facing challenges in managing customer feedback and complaints due to the limitations of their existing system. The company was unable to generate reports to identify trends or track suppliers’ performance. The previous system could not support feedback capture and handling on the scale required by BAH. The company needed a solution that could streamline processes, improve access to management information, and handle the increased volume of feedback in a consistent manner.

Before choosing JustFood, Madrona was using separate accounting and manufacturing systems to run its business. These tools operated independently of each other and meant that the systems had to push and pull data to meet regulatory requirements. Some of the crucial food manufacturing functionality that Madrona required, like lot coding, had to be traced and reviewed from outside the software, resulting in a lack of end-to-end visibility. Another issue Madrona was experiencing was the lack of food-specific functionality in its existing systems. Processes like lot coding, expiration date management, and quality control were extremely manual or required pulling multiple reports from different systems. Realizing it could not maintain its growth on its current platforms, Madrona began searching for a single solution that included the food-specific functionality it required to manage its operations.

The Original Cakerie's biggest challenge was the absence of a single, integrated system, which created data silos and a lack of overall data visibility across departments. TOC initially used many internally built applications to run its business (including Great Plains for financials), but these home grown systems were not able to sustain the company's rapid growth.

La Petite Bretonne, a food processing giant, was facing challenges with its manual processes for purchasing, production, packaging, distribution, and collection. The company was using a management system with handheld computers for distribution and another software tool, but these systems were not integrated. The company wanted to add value to their data integrity and use it to run analytics and create reports to develop winning strategies. However, the data was accessible to several users and could be modified multiple times a day, increasing the risk of human and data entry errors. The company also needed to optimize their processes for buybacks, purchase orders, and various quality control points.

Argon 18, a high-end bike manufacturer, was facing challenges in meeting customer demand due to the use of three different systems that lacked centralization and consistency. The company was experiencing issues such as errors, suboptimal customer service, difficulty in estimating delivery dates, and inefficient sales processes. The management team wanted to replace these systems with a single, customizable, and flexible ERP system that would allow them to focus on their business goals rather than solving office management issues.

Jacmar Automation, a retailer and designer of industrial electronic products, was facing challenges in optimizing their control over project costs and inventory management. They also wanted to expand their business online. The company was in need of a more efficient management solution that would provide better control over their data and save time. It was crucial for Jacmar to have a flexible system that could easily adapt to changes and potential modifications.

Pilot P.B., a company specializing in industrial equipment distribution, was operating with an in-house system that lacked flexibility and could only be maintained by one person. This system was not capable of supporting the company's future needs as it sought to become more efficient and profitable. The company was in need of an advanced management solution that was based on reliable technologies.

Les Dépendances, a company that imports and distributes fine cheeses, was facing operational challenges due to its growth in foreign markets. The company was previously operating with various small software and Excel files, which were no longer sufficient for their expanding operations. They needed an integrated system to optimize their operations and automate their work processes and procedures. The company was also preparing for a change in ownership in 2015, which required a more structured and automated system.