Hamilton switches on better business with Infor

Infor, the industry cloud company, has announced that electrical accessories and supplies manufacturer R. Hamilton & Co has invested in Infor CloudSuite Industrial (SyteLine). Set to support two locations in the United Kingdom, the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application will help improve decision-making and reduce business continuity risks.

With a previous system that was over 20 years old and heavily customised, Hamilton maintenance and support was managed in-house and was reliant on a limited number of personnel, exposing the company to risk. This bottleneck also restricted the flow of information around the business and limited opportunities to implement changes to the business in a fast, effective manner.
 
Hamilton began a process to migrate from its customised in-house system to a modern, flexible ERP application which would reduce risk and deliver more integrated information to aid decision-making. Following a thorough review of the market, Infor CloudSuite Industrial was chosen on the basis of better functionality and the ease with which screens, data and reports could be personalised.
 
Before going live Hamilton performed essential personalisation to ensure that the business could take customer orders (at an average of 1,300 lines per day), produce job documentation for shop floor, process the shipping of orders, purchase stock, invoice customers and pay vendors. Hamilton has since added extra functionality as required.
 
“The major advantage of our new Infor ERP is that more people in the business can take responsibility over their own data,” said Ian Hamilton, managing director, R. Hamilton & Co.  “More department heads can now make more informed decisions because the business information is accessible to everyone.  The next step is to extend this customer information to our sales force on the road and gather new business feedback.”
 
“High volume businesses such as Hamilton rely on lightweight, agile and fast processes that must be robust and resistant to risk,” said Phil Lewis, senior director, solution consulting for Europe, Infor. “Dealing with so many SKUs, bottlenecks and the threat of points of failure cannot be tolerated. However, as this project shows, updating core systems such as ERP does not mean that ongoing operations need to be interrupted. The evolution of business processes can be a smooth and quick project that leads to a more stable platform.”