Overview
Blue Group is a specialist provider of materials processing equipment for the quarrying and waste recycling industries in England, Scotland and Wales. Formed in 2004 with eight strategically located offices throughout the UK, it has a turnover of £100 million.
The group needed an ERP solution that could deliver all of the back-office functionality as well as manage its field service requirements. It looked at a number of ERP solutions in the marketplace including Microsoft NAV, Sage 200 and also some industry specific service-oriented packages. It chose to implement SAP Business One with Frontline.
Business Challenges
The group was struggling to extract data from its existing ERP software, Ibcos Gold, specifically visibility and control over operations was challenging with only limited reporting functionality.
Driven by two companies within the group, Blue Machinery Southern and Blue Fuchs, the directors wanted better visibility and more control over the company operations. Blue was finding it difficult to extract data from the Ibcos software along with limited reporting functionality. In addition to this, it was becoming apparent that there was a lack of ongoing development to the software. Blue needed a modern ERP package with improved usability and access to real time reporting along with a more efficient, integrated field service solution.
Frontline integrated the full functionality of the industry leading JobWatch mobile workforce solution into SAP Business One giving users a range of functions including job management, inventory control, financial planning, dispatch and fleet management.
“The business had been using Ibcos Gold over a six-year period however cracks had started to appear with the software not delivering in a number of key areas. We wanted one product that could cover 90% of our business requirements and then selected JobWatch to enhance the SAP Service Management functionality.
We looked at three or four field service management solutions and this was the most impressive. It was a leap of faith but JobWatch is a fantastic system and I have absolutely no regrets about implementing it.”
Pete Lidbetter, Group IT Manager, Blue Group
SAP Business One and JobWatch allows:
- Reduction in manual processes when managing field service requirements
- A closed, automated loop process within SAP Business One which auto-alerts an engineer.
- JobWatch to auto-update SAP ready to be invoiced – no data re-entry.
Results
- Improved efficiencies and significantly reduced administrative time due to manual processes being automated.
- Time spent on a job, distance travelled, parts used, etc are all captured within the solution and the job card is automatically updated.
- Creation of customised reports and interrogation of the database.
- Visual dashboards for high-level overview of business performance.
- Future proofed – SAP has a long-term software dev roadmap.
- Frontline’s off the shelf tools that enhance the native functionality within SAP Business One – document management system.
- Increased functionality without compromising usability
“We have a good relationship with the Frontline consultants and also the wider resources at Frontline during the sales and pre-sales process. As far as the user is concerned, it is Business One, they are not logging into separate systems,”
Pete Lidbetter, Group IT Manager, Blue Group
