Fox’s Confectionery
Case Study: Fox’s Confectionery
• Industry: Food Manufacturing
• Location: Leicester, UK
Key Challenge
• MBO meant restructuring business and systems for self sufficiency
Key Benefits
• System to support independent growing business
• Rationalised business processes
• Improved information access
• Reduced cost of ownership
About The Company
When Fox’s Confectionery was bought out from Northern Foods, it needed to rescale its IT system. It selected Solarsoft to provide equivalent functionality, but without massive support infrastructure.
Based in Leicester, Fox’s Confectionery employs over 120 people and has annual revenues in the region of £15 million. Founded in 1897, the company was acquired by John Mackintosh & Sons Ltd (subsequently Rowntree Mackintosh) in 1969 and, from 2001 to 2003, was part of Northern Foods. Fox’s Glacier Mints are probably the best-known products in the Fox’s Confectionery range but they’re not the only famous name in the portfolio. Glacier Fruits; Glacier Dark; Poppets; Just Brazils; XXX mints and the newly branded XXXtreme combine to form a strong brand line-up.
The Situation
In 2003, the company was acquired by Big Bear Ltd and was transformed from a small unit in a conglomerate into a single-site, autonomous company. That change required fundamental rethinking of infrastructure and systems. “The existing ERP system we had been using was too big and too expensive for our needs,” said finance director, Peter Roberts. Fox’s had an agreement for up to a year’s support from the former parent’s centralised IT department but at a very high monthly cost. “We immediately started looking for an alternative system that would replicate existing functionality but at a lower price.”
The change also presented an opportunity to strengthen management controls and produce a consistent view a ‘single version of the truth’, as the saying goes. “There was some round the edge activity in some areas, and we used spreadsheets for forecasting and planning, which meant we had some different perspectives on the data. There was also considerable duplication of effort, with re-keying of data in creating production plans and shipping documents, for example,” said Barrie Pitney, IT manager. Fox’s considered a number of different systems, including continuing to use SAP, before finally selecting Tropos.
The Solution
“We involved every function within the company and agreed that Tropos would enable us to be self sufficient, and that data extraction would be very good,” he said. The financial ledgers are based on CODA, while planning and forecasting is supported by data analysis with Cognos Business Intelligence. While the original objective was to simply replace the previous ERP system functionality, the use of the new system has brought about improvements.
Solarsoft has also worked with Fox’s to enhance the existing capabilities. Integrating volume sales rebates was particularly important. Sales are made through food broker clients to the ultimate customers, and because of this complexity rebates were formerly calculated on spreadsheets. “We wanted the ability to interface orders from external sources, and Solarsoft wrote a function to make it easier for us.”
Fox’s installed three network servers. The Tropos application server, a web server and a mail server and around 50 new workstations and desktop computers. Time to implementation was vital: if it had slipped beyond the 12-months agreed support period, the company would have had to pay even higher fees to its former parent. “We went live in June 2004, closed out the accounts on the old ERP and cut the umbilical cord at the end of July, one month early,” said Pitney. “We had anticipated that we’d need help from our former parent to extract migration data. In the event Bill Ward, the consultant from Solarsoft and I were able to do it ourselves.”
Results & Benefits
Ease of use helped with acceptance and the transition was much smoother than expected. “Sales are very impressed with the new system and the maintenance of forecasting has become a lot slicker,” he said. “We’re using Windows® XP on the workstations and desktops, with Office desktop applications, which is a comfortable and familiar environment. Microsoft Access® allows us to perform user defined queries under the previous regime, there were times we couldn’t perform functions we wanted and had to go to central support for help, which was often chargeable.”
Implementing a new ERP system in a fast moving company invariably creates challenges. “Our initial objectives were broadly achieved, with some reservations,” said Peter Roberts. “There is an issue with correction of mistakes in works order review and also with fractions of small percentages in production quantities, which is important to us as flavouring is a significant part of our cost base. But we are working with Solarsoft and our staff to resolve these issues as part of the programme of continual improvement.” “We have found that Solarsoft does listen to its customers. We see extra functionality appearing based on feedback from other users and becoming part of the whole offer,” said Pitney. “We still need some support but we have got large-system functionality within a self-sufficient organisation, and we’re finding a lot of the old restrictions aren’t there any more. We enjoy being masters of our own destiny; we’re producing better information and
moving forward.”
In summary Tropos provides Fox’s Confectionery with the cost effective business systems platform they needed to support their strategy of operational excellence, organic growth and future acquisitions.
