Newport Industries Limited was established in 1997 and now has offices in London, Shanghai, and Liverpool. Newport has established itself as a niche distributor of chemicals relying on supply chain management activities to enhance its services to clients and suppliers. The company supplies in excess of 250,000 MTs of chemicals per year, with over 200 products spread over ten application industries. Every product is specific to a sourcing situation, precisely monitored for quality and consistency.

The decision to transition to SAP Business One stemmed from Tim Smith’s Newport was experiencing a range of different challenges, but all were centred on the fact that too many operational tasks were being completed manually, outside of the company’s core IT systems. In turn, this led to unnecessary inefficiencies, duplications and even errors – which were then compounded by the company’s massive growth over recent years. The sheer volume of orders and collections each day meant that the system processes struggled to keep up.

This led to slow rates of invoicing clients, Orders were processed too slowly There was no integration with business intelligence (BI), meaning that the company was missing out on opportunities to streamline and enhance its processes in response to tangible business insights.

Newport was using SAP Business One as its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system but needed to extend this to cover all its business processes – and it sought an IT managed services provider to help develop, support and maintain the new setup.

As well as moving to SAP Business One, EverEdge also created a new Newport was predominantly using the elements of SAP Business One which focus on wholesale and distribution: Accounts, Sales, Purchasing and Warehouse Management. We developed a custom addon to manage the job costing aspects of the business, as well as new user interface functionality through the Boyum Usability pack. Meanwhile, in order to enhance business process automation, we implemented the Codeless Platforms Business Process Automation application.

Throughout the entire project process we held a weekly project updates call to track delivery and mange any issues. Once each phase of development was completed, the users tested their new processes before deploying to the live environment.

The project did not stop there. Since re-establishing the SAP Business One support contract and the intense program of development to improve the processes, APH has been awarded three further contracts within Newport. Firstly, the company was running its entire SAP solution on dated on-premise servers. During the process we discussed the flexibility and scalability benefits of our cloud hosted platform, and Newport decided to migrate its SAP estate accordingly.

Secondly, and in conjunction with this cloud hosting, we are providing Newport with a complete cloud solution for all its desktop users. Now users can access a hosted desktop which contains all their business-critical applications through one cloud portal managed by APH.

Thirdly, in moving its core infrastructure to the cloud, it made sense for Newport to migrate its managed services contract to APH.