Acrastyle recharges its IT to generate new business

Support to grow its business by up to 15% without increasing overheads is the key expectation at electricity equipment manufacturer Acrastyle from a new ERP system. Being implemented by Access Supply Chain, and due to go live in May, that benefit will be achieved by removing duplication of effort, eliminating errors and waste from its manufacturing and business processes and improving visibility. Says IT manager Gareth Boyd: “The Access system will tell us exactly how much a job costs, how much we’re spending on WIP, when the project is finished, what the labour and material costs were and how it compared to what we’d tendered.” It’s all about competing without cutting margins. Acrastyle’s existing IT system was based on a collection of non-integrated legacy systems developed in individual departments – estimating; purchasing; project management and accounts. Boyd wrote custom scripts using information from its legacy systems to demonstrate the benefits of a change to a single database, with information flowing throughout the company. “The business case was clear-cut,” he says. “The system would allow us to put more work through without increasing the number of personnel pro-rata; and we could price more competitively without slashing our margins. We will be able to increase revenues by 10—15% without increasing the overhead, principally by eliminating our manual processes and being more efficient.” Boyd is particularly enthusiastic about the Access system’s tiered-search facility. “We will buy a particular relay, which is a generic type but with, maybe, 64 different variations [and] we need to select the right set of attributes for the job. The Access system allows us to select a part from the database, drill down to the final level and drop it into the quote. The component specified on the quote is then entered automatically into the bill of materials and the purchase order system.”