Improved information flow with Sage Line 500

The company
Severn Trent Services is a member of the Severn Trent Plc group of companies, an international environmental services leader that generated sales last year of £1.8 billion. The company is a leading supplier of water and waste-water treatment solutions. It offers an extremely broad range of services and products for disinfection, instrumentation and filtration, rehabilitation and repair, contract operating and advanced residential water metering technologies.

"The creation of a consolidated system has already halved the
time taken to produce month end reports, Information is
available in real time and, with drill down facility, in much
greater detail.”
Ian Valentine,
Management Accountant & Sage Implementation Project Manager

The challenge
Having enjoyed significant growth over the last few years Severn Trent Services embarked upon a process of business reorganisation.

Ian Valentine, Management Accountant & Sage Implementation Project Manager, Severn Trent Services, explains, “To remain competitive and meet our growth targets requires excellent financial control. However, with a diverse business portfolio and no integrated finance and manufacturing solution it was difficult to attain meaningful cross-business information. To improve cost control, reduce the administrative overhead and add competitive advantage, Severn Trent Services needed to improve reporting and provide managers with rapid access to detailed, real time information.”

The company’s primary requirement was to implement a single accounting system that would integrate the main business areas and provide a scalable platform to support continued growth. Critically, the system had to be flexible.

Ian Valentine continues, “We operate with customers at many levels, from providing spare parts to solve individual plant operations issues to providing entire water and wastewater treatment systems with the full range of plant and system operation, maintenance and preventative maintenance, to the manufacture and supply of water meters, meter reading and billing technologies. We had to put in place a system that could support the needs of these growing businesses, from project costings to manufacturing control and quality assurance.”

The solution
The company turned to ERP software specialist CPiO who recommended Sage Line 500. Valentine confirms, “Sage Line 500 is a highly flexible system that offers in depth functionality without becoming overcomplicated. Furthermore, it is a complete product that delivers both core accounting and manufacturing capability and a range of add-on modules that we can explore to attain further benefit once the core system is in place.”

He adds, “CPiO showed real interest in understanding our business and the financial issues facing it going forward. The company put in a lot of work up front to demonstrate how Sage Line 500 would meet our requirements.”

Severn Trent Services decided to go for a phased implementation. Phase One saw the system rolled out to 50 users at the company’s head office in Sutton Coldfield. Core accounting functions, including sales and purchase order processing, job costing and inventory control were deployed on time and to budget.

In the second phase of the project, Sage Line 500 was implemented at Severn Trent Services Instrumentation facility at Didcot, as well as at their Chesterfield based business unit, Severn Trent Metering Services. The implementation at Chesterfield and Didcot included the MRP module and product-capability bar coding for production areas.

The solution was developed further by the introduction of the Sage Saleslogix CRM across the company to give greater visibility and better management of customers and prospects.

The benefits
A key benefit is the integration between different areas of the business including stock and inventory control and job costing. This is proving particularly useful in managing the costs of large plant and building contracts with project engineers having real time access to project and committed costs, using drill down to gain deeper insight. “Using MRP we can improve the efficiency of our stock control process,” says Valentine.

The use of bar codes has further improved traceability of goods throughout the manufacturing process. “This will enable us to respond immediately to any problems in product quality – either finished goods or raw materials.”

Severn Trent Services has benefitted from the extensive reporting solution that CPiO implemented. “The creation of a consolidated system has already halved the time taken to produce month end reports,” says Valentine. “Information is available in real time and, with drill down facility, in much greater detail.”

Severn Trent Services is also experiencing greater visibility of its customer and prospect opportunities through SalesLogix CRM. With full integration into Sage Line 500 end users are now able to get a holistic view of accounts leading to less duplication of effort and greater understanding of the needs of our customers.

The future
Severn Trent Services is now evaluating how best to leverage its Sage Line 500 investment to deliver additional benefit. Plans include the use of the Cognos reporting tool to increase the speed of producing month end reports still further and the integration of the SalesLogix CRM tool – both implementations will be handled by CPiO.

Says Valentine, “Throughout the company rapid access to information is providing a major commercial advantage. Faster reaction to cost situations is enabling Severn Trent Services to be more efficient. This is especially key in the project business where significant growth over the past 12 months has led to large workloads. Sage Line 500 is enabling the excellent financial control required to maximise profitability.”