Swinton goes for integrated ERP

£2m Swinton Electro-Plating (SEP) expects to improve on-time delivery performance and improve customer service as a result of its new five-user ERP system from Information Engineering, which went live in December. SEP, which specialises in hard chrome plating for the offshore oil and gas industry – with customers like Mono Pumps, Halliburton and Schlumberger – as well as the hydraulics, textiles and paper, plastics, engineering and electronics industries, needed to change when its existing system went out of support. Godfrey Evans, SEP’s managing director, says: “What we wanted to do was eliminate as many of our manual processes as possible.” And by way of example, he says: “The amount of time it takes to raise works and sales orders has been prohibitive, purely because we have to enter them from scratch each time.” The reason was the classic: no link between SEP’s original quotation, sales order and final invoice. And with up to 50 quotations a month, that sometimes meant carrying out more work than was charged. The new system addresses that, and also allows SEP to extract standard financial and sales analysis reports for real-time business visibility. Says Evans, “We chose Information Engineering because we were very impressed with their demonstration of Syspro and what it could do for us, and because they showed a real understanding of our business.”