Dudson automates inter-company trading, with DataSwitch

Ervin Davis, strategic support director at Dudson, says that the company went live with Syspro in July last year, but had to manually transfer information from external sources, such as EDI messages or database transactions. Now, with DataSwitch, purchase orders raised in one of the subsidiaries, for example, transfer automatically into sales orders for the manufacturing company, he explains. Also, when invoiced, inventory is automatically transferred into a transit warehouse and receipted into stock simply by entering an invoice reference. The invoice is then posted automatically into accounts payable – meaning that inter-company trading imbalances have been eradicated completely. "Throughout the Dudson organisation worldwide, we make countless company transactions. These were previously keyed in several times over to create purchase orders, recreate sales orders within each site, invoice, receive goods in and post invoices," says Davis. "Our aim was to simplify these time consuming, laborious inter-company transactions – and we are achieving our goals with savings of 100s of man-hours per week across our worldwide sites. Indeed, DataSwitch has more than paid for itself since day one." And he adds: "The additional benefit of DataSwitch means that we have integrity of information. We don't get typos and we no longer have misunderstandings. The benefits are fantastic. We have a hugely reduced amount of paper work such as credit notes. We would in the past have to issue these due to incorrect receipts or misinterpretations."