De Beers selects JD Edwards for APS

Advanced planning and scheduling and supply chain functionality seems to have swung a £1 million contract for JD Edwards’ OneWorld XE enterprise system (ERP and ) at Shannon-based natural and synthetic diamond and industrial super-abrasives producer De Beers Industrial. Gerrard O’Rourke, group IS manager at De Beers, says: “JD Edwards’ software is a strategic investment. It will help us centralise core business processes such as financials, reduce inventory due to better planning and supply chain optimisation and provide quick ROI (return on investment) through lowering our working capital.” He explains: “Our existing disparate systems do not allow us to have a complete view of our business or the processes we are operating across the group. OneWorld XE will enable us to work as a virtual company creating a single centralised image of core business processes and improved visibility across our supply chain. “The group’s plan … is to extend our supply chain to enable external collaboration with customers, partners and suppliers. [This] will see us execute on our plans for procurement and fulfilment capability, and with OneWorld XE we have a system flexible enough to add more solutions as our business changes.” The first implementation site is due to go live by spring 2002, and the firm plans to have phase one rolled out to the whole organisation, covering 25 countries and over 2,500 staff, by mid 2003. The solution will run on an IBM iSeries (AS/400) server on a DB2 database.