Avon Rubber bounces higher with Sage ERP X3

Sage Mid-Market Europe, part of global software and services company Sage PLC, has announced that Avon Rubber PLC is achieving greater levels of business success with the flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution Sage ERP X3 and Sage Enterprise Intelligence.

Avon Rubber has a history stretching back to 1885, manufacturing rubber-based products for a diverse set of customers ranging from the armed forces, emergency services and the dairy and farming market, among others. Avon Protection is a provider of advanced chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) respiratory protection systems. Avon also has a leading dairy business, its Milkrite brand, serving the milking industry.

With a strong emphasis on research and development, Avon designs, tests and manufactures specialist products from a number of sites in the US and UK and further afield, with a very distributed workforce, serving markets around the world. Thousands of products are moved between Avon's sites each month to the business' offices, factories and distribution centres.

"Before we implemented Sage ERP X3, we had eight separate accounting and operation applications, each with its own reporting engine," recalls Mike DePasquale, Group Enterprise Systems Manager at Avon Rubber. ―There was no consistency, poor visibility, and our IT resources were stretched just helping our users obtain the basic information they needed. Such a big business required a system that could handle this diversity and number of sites, users and products around the world, including the differing needs of local financial management, national legislation, currencies and languages."

DePasquale continued, "Data was always being transitioned from system to spreadsheet and back again, and we struggled to streamline our processes. Our businesses would be invoicing each other as goods were moved around the organisation, with duplicate data being entered many times in differing systems. We were looking for a package that allowed us to implement a solution with one set of controls and processes that would work across some very different businesses, seamlessly and a partner who understood complex businesses such as Avon and had above average competence with the package we selected.

Sage ERP X3, delivered by our global partner Inixion, satisfied both of these key requirements with Sage ERP X3 giving the package depth, breadth and flexibility we required; even allowing us to personalise for our very specialist needs, such as where we have strict import/export controls on militarily sensitive products. Inixion, a Sage Strategic Partner specialising solely in Sage ERP X3, have more than justified our partner choice on more than one occasion; enabling Avon to gain the best from Sage ERP X3, challenging our processes to take advantage of other features and industry best practices and working successfully with all of our team, from shop floor to Senior Management."

"As a global business with multiple sites Avon holds 400 Sage ERP X3 licences, yet 95% of the functionality they use is out of the box'. Inixion, with Sage ERP X3, has made a complex situation very simple for Avon to manage, allowing them to focus on innovating and delivering high quality products relied upon by some of the world's most demanding customers," said Christophe Vanackere, COO for Sage ERP X3.

"Avon Rubber is a business with growth in the double digits, and Sage, with our Strategic Partner Inixion, is supporting their continued success."

The new Sage ERP X3 version 7 enables companies to revive growth and profitability by providing employees with the information they need to serve customers better, to take back control over quality, and to eliminate inefficiencies across the organisation. It gives all employees the information they need, when they need it, and makes it easy to manage complex business processes.