Business Imperative
In 2014, Dartford-based Safetell recognised that the business systems on which it depended were no longer adequate for its needs.
A manufacturer and installer of security solutions such as bullet-resistant doors and partitions, and attack-resistant screens for use in banks, it required tight integration between the manufacturing system, which orchestrated the production of its products, and the field service system that managed the subsequent installation.
Safetell鈥檚 Pegasus Opera manufacturing system, in use for almost 20 years, was based on Microsoft鈥檚 Visual FoxPro database language. Tesseract, the company鈥檚 field service management system, was SQL-based and more modern. But the two systems were not properly integrated and required complex and manually-intensive data feeds in order to communicate at all.
鈥淭here was a lot of manual data entry, with a significant potential for error,鈥 recalls Andy Norris, Safetell鈥檚 IT Manager. 鈥淐oupled to a significant increase in business activity, it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep the two systems synchronised.鈥