Sunpac grows with Pick-based system

The Sunpac Group, distributor of personal grooming products, such as nail care and brushware, votes Pick Systems database software as the best in South Africa.

Sunpac runs its entire financial management and stock control system in three of its four subsidiary companies on Picks` D³ database that has been customised to provide information on stock within seconds.

The Sunpac system runs up to 5 000 stock items at any point in time. This requires a sophisticated debtors and stock control system. The Pick system can handle several hundreds of thousands of items.

The Pick system allows quick and various ways of retrieving and presenting data such as stock averages and the unlimited amount of prices in stock items. A specialised stock monitoring system has been developed for replenishing stock according to historic sales pattern.

The Pick system is also useful for maintaining bulk and packed stock records so that correct quantities of stocks are held at all times to limit incidences when items are reported out of stock.

Says Susan Saber, IT developer at Sunpac, "The system has proved very stable

and scaleable. We have been using it for ten years without any major problems."

Saber points to the need for Sunpac to integrate all information from the multiple warehouses from four subsidiary companies. The flexibility of Pick not only allowed them to upgrade the system according to their needs but also to cut time delays in retrieving information on stock items and prices from all of their warehouses.

"Rather than installing a new programme which can cost as much as R600 000, we were able to adapt the Pick system to suit our changing needs as Sunpac evolved with multiple new companies. I cannot think of a system that is flexible as Pick. Most importantly, the system is already Y2k compliant," enthuses Saber.

"The initial implementation involved installing invoicing, debtors, stock records and general ledger software. In order to provide even better management tools, programs have been developed to extract data and automatically build spreadsheets in Excel. Management can even load these in notebook computers when travelling oversees on buying trips," says Bob Marshall, Director of T & M Software, the Pick VAR, who headed the installation at Sunpac.

"Pick offers a totally variable length system which enables changes to the database without having to re-write existing codes or rebuild files. New reports can be developed in Pick far more easily than with other system, provided that the initial file structures have been properly created, " adds Marshall.

The current version of D3 runs under Sco UNIX and supports a network of 15 character based terminals as well as an Ethernet LAN with PC`s running Windows 95.

"Pick Systems are constantly improving their product. We have often taken advantage of these new developments and we are currently extending the system to include some sophisticated inventory control methods," says Marshall.