ERP experience - SOLEMEA - for small and medium sized manufacturers

SOLEMEA has over 30 years of ERP experience, going back to the original days of MRP & MRPII, with its emphasis on Ollie Wight based training and education and the goal of Class A status, through to the newer generation of cloud based ERP platforms.

In recent years our experience has been with SAP Business One, (SAPB1), on both the SAP HANA and Microsoft SQL platforms. In total we have experience of over 75 SAP Business One implementations, in both the manufacturing and distribution sectors.

Those implementations ranged from 5/10 user small businesses, turning over anything between £5M to £10M, to medium sized businesses deploying over 75 users in businesses between £50M and £100M.

Alongside this we also have worked with Infor CloudSuite Industrial (also called Syteline by those of us with a history in the industry!).

Our experience began though, in the 1980’s, within a Gas Turbine manufacturer that was replacing an ageing HP3000 based system called MAS/H and replacing it with a mainframe based system from ICL called OMAC. As part of the implementation team for that project, the whole plethora of MRP/MRPII training and education was explored and APICS certification was achieved, making the principal at solemea one of the first UK based recipients of this certification.

That experience as an end user, gained over several years in a heavy assemble to order / engineer to order (ATO/ETO) environment proved invaluable during the transition into consulting with the venerable ASK MANMAN solution, a product which though rendered obsolete by the advent of UNIX, Microsoft and Oracle, still, to this day, sets a benchmark for functional completeness in areas such as Service Management and Repetitive Manufacturing.

From character based user interfaces, the next step in our ERP experience was with Fourth Shift, where implementation and sales experience was gained in over 20 countries as small to medium sized businesses worldwide, and subsidiaries of “tier one” multinationals (like Unilever and Gillette) rolled out this client/server based solution which set new standards for ease of use and functionality in the “pre Microsoft Windows” era.

UNIX, SQL and Oracle were the next ports of call with Tetra CS/3 (now part of the Sage Portfolio) and mTMS / evolution as that latter product was “re-skinned”, rebranded and successfully relaunched as a highly configurable solution for mid market manufacturers in the USA.

The USA and the UAE played a prominent role in the 1990’s and early new millenium with Fourth Shift, mTMS evolution and Baan IVc4 being solutions that gave even more experience. All of these products are now part of the Infor portfolio.

Then, SAP Business One came into view – a perfect solution for small to mid sized businesses – as long as they didn’t want too much in the way of manufacturing functionality! And then Computec launched ProcessForce and small to medium sized batch process manufacturers, in food, beverages, chemicals, pharmaceutical businesses now have the perfect combination of robust and complete functionality with industry specific features.

Those experiences, with multiple leading ERP solutions, across various industry sectors, embracing multiple cultures in global businesses, are what makes SOLEMEA a unique consulting business.