Keeping it Simple with Sage Line 500
The company
Accantia Health & Beauty Limited was formed as a result of a buyout from global medical devices company Smith & Nephew Plc.

Accantia Health and Beauty manufacture and supply skin care products, toiletries and feminine hygiene products, its most high profile brands comprising of Simple and Lil-Lets. Annually the business manufactures 450 million tampons to support Lil-lets’ number two position in the tampon market. Recently Accantia has entered into the production of a Simple Men’s and Baby range of products making it a leading force in the health and beauty market. Based in Birmingham Accantia has over 500 employees and distribution outlets nationwide.

“The key issue was to ensure that the
business had the right quantities of stock at
all times at the third party warehouse by
ordering the correct quantities from our Alum
Rock site. But even more basic was our desire
- to switch off SAP!”
Simon Pinks, Financial Controller.

The challenge
Three years on from the management buyout from pharmaceutical giant Smith and Nephew, Accantia was experiencing problems with its SAP system. This system had been replicated from the SAP solution deployed globally by Smith and Nephew and was representing a significant financial overhead to the business. When SAP announced it was withdrawing support from the version it was running from December 2004 Accantia decided to seek an alternative IT solution. The business wanted to replace SAP across warehousing, distribution, sales, order management and finance, and implement a solution that supported its multiple operating companies to ease month end consolidation and reporting. The business was running software to transmit purchase orders and works orders and needed the replacement system to work in conjunction with this.

The solution
Accantia considered a number of SAP replacement options including Microsoft’s Axapta and Great Plains software, prior to selecting Sage Line 500 from CPiO. The project provided a clear opportunity to simplify and streamline processes across the business.

CPiO consultants implemented the 60 user Sage Line 500 software within five months. They provided consultancy, project management and an education programme to support the roll out of the system which has been deployed across an IBM cluster server, employing the latest fail over technology for high availability. Sage Line 500 was able to integrate electronically to Accantia’s third party logistics warehouse company who provide delivery and storage. When an order is placed with Accantia, a request is sent to Exel Logistics who prepare and send out the goods and return an invoice to Accantia for payment.

Accantia also chose to implement a management reporting solution to run from within Sage Line 500; Sage Business Intelligence (Sage BI). Sage BI reporting gave Accantia management a powerful OLAP reporting tool to analyse data deep inside Sage Line 500, enabling them to understand purchase behaviours and product trends.

The benefits
The Sage ERP system is used to provide a forecast of the finished goods stock requirements. The system also allows Accantia to create purchase orders, invoice processing, works orders and to control raw material, work in progress and finished goods stock, as well as providing accurate financial information for management.

Employees from across the enterprise can now work with one set of data in a user friendly, intuitive environment. Sage has enabled the business to achieve global visibility and therefore information can be shared across Accantia’s nine separate distribution outlets. Subsequently the month end management accounts procedure is dramatically reduced from four days to just one and the running costs of the software has reduced.

The future
Accantia feels that it has the best solution to carry it forward over the coming years. The company is gaining such tangible benefits from Sage Line 500 and BI that it is now assured of improved customer relations, greater communication and financials savings.

Through using Sage BI, Accantia is currently identifying other areas of the business where the company can introduce even greater efficiencies.