G. Costa reduces reporting effort by 40 per cent with Infor Manufacturing Essentials

New reporting solution goes live

Infor, the largest global enterprise software provider focused on developing solutions for the manufacturing and distribution industries, announces that G.Costa, a UK food manufacturer and international sourcing company for its flagship brand - Blue Dragon , has invested in a new reporting solution. Performance Analyser.  The system will provide unprecedented in depth access to information held within the companys enterprise resource planning (ERP) system - Infor Manufacturing Essentials, which operates on an IBM iSeries server. All managers will have easy, browser-based access to data, releasing the IT and finance department from the burden of generating reports.

Dale Coveney, Commercial Finance Manager for G. Costa, said: I used to spend around two days a week merely generating reports for our sales and marketing managers. Performance Analyser will provide ready access to detailed pre-formatted reports. Previously I was spending 40 per cent of my time producing information whereas I am now reinvesting that time in analysing critical business information to aid the business.

The contract was awarded to Infor after a thorough review process, as explained by G. Costas Head of IT, Glen Boyle: Instead of doing a simple beauty parade we gave each company a detailed set of our data and said show us what you can do with this. It worked extremely well as we could get a real feel for the products capabilities within our own environment. It helped us dismiss one vendor straight away and the other showed that it would take an extra three months to create the metadata and the data extracts. This was just too long. The Infor solution was not only the most functional but it could be deployed extremely quickly, as it has a semi-prebuilt universe over the existing ERP data.

Trevor Smith, Infors VP for UK and Ireland added: Infor worked closely with G.Costa to understand its business needs. Previously it was too difficult to extract data which was often out-of-date. In the business environment G.Costa operates in, it was vital that they had speedy access to data across the business. Performance Analyser will provide them with real time access to centrally held data. It will be used to provide advanced analytical capabilities on profitability by product, category, customer, and salesperson. G. Costa will have ultimate control over margin performance across the entire business.