All Spares Marine is a Sydney-based small business which sells spare parts for marine engines. With a strong focus on service, the business carries high stock levels to be able to meet the requirements of shipyards all around Australia for parts at a moment’s notice. The business imports 80 per cent of its stock from overseas, and has around 500 active customers.
Challenge
Since its establishment in 1990, the company had run its accounts and inventory on a DOS-based system. While the system was “bulletproof”, says Bill Edwards, who serves as a business adviser to All Marine Spares, it did have some limitations – printing was difficult and emailing from the system was impossible. When preparing to sell the business, the owners began to look for another solution, and decided to implement SAP Business One.
“Most of the potential buyers didn’t understand what DOS was, and they did think of it as a risk for the future,” Edwards says.
Implementation
Having selected the SAP system, All Marine Spares had some difficulty finding an SAP implementation partner that would listen to their requirements and seek a way to meet these. In fact, Edwards says, the first two SAP partners they spoke with would not listen to All Marine’s needs, forcing the company to contact SAP Australia direct to help them find a partner that would be more responsive to their needs.
Ultimately All Marine Spares engaged Leverage Technologies to undertake the project. Leverage was able to demonstrate the understanding of small business that was important to All Marine, particularly as they were keen to retain many of the processes that had worked well for the business in stock control and accounting.
The implementation took a little over a month, going live in April 2014.
Data was extracted from the DOS system to Excel, refined, and loaded into Business One. Leverage provided end user training for the key personnel in the business. After the system was switched over during the course of a weekend, All Marine was able to begin trading again the following Monday, using the new system. The users had no problems adopting the system and were able to hit the ground running after their initial training.
Business benefits
Business One was well-equipped to manage the several different currencies All Marine purchases stock in, and the business has been able to maintain its existing procedures for receipting, stock counting and rolling stocktakes.
“The import process is critical, and how we manage deposits we’ve paid for overseas and goods we’ve sold before we even have them in the warehouse – that’s all been managed because Leverage listened to what we needed,” Edwards says.
Being able to email invoices and statements directly from the system has also brought considerable efficiencies to the business, as has being able to access the reports they needed.
Perhaps the most significant benefit of the implementation was the successful sale of the business to a New York-based company.
“They were just over the moon with the systems we had in place, especially now we have SAP, because they can see the stock’s controlled,” Edwards says.