Kendall Medical, the multinational supplier of surgical devices, has completed the fastest South African conversion of BPCS, the ERP suite from System Software Associates, going live inside 11 weeks.
As a consequence Kendall is positioned to support its $13bn-a-year holding company, Tyco International, in its ongoing series of acquisitions worldwide. It is the first company in the group to implement BPCS 6.0.0.4, the most recent iteration of BPCS.
Before implementing BPCS in line with Tyco`s head-office decision, Kendall Medical had run its back-office systems on a mix of the Mapics, Impact and JD Edwards ERP applications. This had led to a management nightmare, with no unified view of the business and inadequate information extracting and reporting capabilities.
"Our processes were riddled with data duplication and errors because of the separate systems," recalls Kendall sales manager Dennis Holden. "Our first benefit from BPCS is our ability to get at information in realtime."
Kendall Medical, formerly Sherwood Davis & Geck, had been running on the systems of fellow pharmaceutical company Wyeth. Industry developments meant that Kendall had to provide its own information systems and, despite the fact that Wyeth committed to supporting Kendall for 18 months, the Kendall management team set their deadline at three months.
"That we beat it by a week was due to a number of factors," says Holden. "Firstly, we went for a basic, or vanilla implementation of BPCS Client/Server 6.0.0.4. It gave us a 95% fit, especially as we changed our business to suit BPCS rather than the other way around."
Tracy Millar of PricewaterhouseCoopers Management Consulting Services was seconded as project manager. Although she had no experience with BPCS, she had ERP experience and she found the new suite easy to grasp and implement. For Millar, a critical success factor was "having a high-level decision-maker on board in Dennis. This meant we didn`t have to make decisions by committee, a factor which can stall any ERP implementation".
Kendall installed all appropriate modules - as it only imports finished goods and does not manufacture any of its own, and outsources the maintenance of its warehouse, it did not install the manufacturing or warehouse modules. BPCS was installed on an AS/400 S70, with users running against it with Windows 95-based PCs. The combination is stable, scalable and totally reliable, says Holden.
With Phase 1 complete, Kendall will now move to Phase 2 which involves the integration of Kendall SA with Kendall Medical. "A stable, low-maintenance back-office platform is crucial for Kendall to fit in with Tyco`s global acquisition strategy," says Holden. "This is our primary reason for not customising BPCS. Having a standard implementation means we can easily integrate acquired companies into our existing structure. In this form it can easily manage many companies on one system."
Chaos had prevailed with the company`s legacy Impact-JD Edwards-Mapics environment, Holden recalls. "We had a nightmare managing our creditors and our billings, and reports were available just once a month, and then late. We have seen our first benefits already in integrated applications running against a common database, with consistent look and feel between modules, easy availability of information, realtime reporting and easy, low-cost maintenance.
"At the end of the day, we`re a surgical supplies company, not an IT company. We don`t want to focus on IT, and BPCS on the AS/400 allows us to install it and forget it, with a minimum of user training."
Kendall will implement electronic data interchange in the medium to long term, Holden concludes. "BPCS is very strong in this area, allowing us to implement it when we`re ready."
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