Access ushers in new era of consolidated manufacturing solutions

Group managing director Alistair O'Reilly says it's not just about creating one much larger, mid-market organisation, but also bringing the skills and technologies together so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. "So whereas we were Access Accounting and Access Supply Chain, for example, now we will be a full-service consulting organisation, and software and solutions house. "We've spent several years bringing these organisations together under common ownership and getting them all working together with the same look and feel and synergistic technologies," explains O'Reilly. "We want our mid-market customers to be able to select from a wide range of software that all works together. They're demanding more than stand-alone packaged software, and we're very much there for them as part of that demographic," he adds. He also points to the fact that, to get here, his organisation has gone through the same pains as many of its potential customers. "We've brought five ordering systems, CRM, service management, five company cultures together. So we know what's involved ourselves," says O'Reilly. And he adds: "Now, we have more than 65 consultants to call on and the number of people on our hotline has quadrupled." Incidentally, those are real numbers: "Large parts of the supply chain solution, for example, were authored elsewhere in the group, so our expertise is spread throughout our staff. The can all cover our much wider portfolio of software – procurement, workflow tools, document automation and management, accounting for carbon emissions etc."