Introduction
Natgraph has been established since 1980 and has gained a reputation as a key player in the global industrial printing market. Based in Nottingham, they export nearly 90% a large portion of their factory output to customers across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Natgraph answers the needs of the most demanding print applications in the world with products that are the drying and curing choice of leading companies within the automotive, medical, electronics, security print, glass, label, renewable energy and other print finishing markets.
Background
Having been established for over forty years, Natgraph had been using several legacy on-premise software systems that didn’t communicate with each other, as well as a finance solution that didn’t give managers insight into the manufacturing side of the business. Managers realised their previous solutions were holding them back and weren’t going to support the business’s growth into the future so they took their time to research the market to find a scalable solution that would meet the business needs. The main requirement was expanding their insight into the manufacturing side of the business with greater visibility of stock and product costing, as well as advanced analytics to help support their decision making and business growth.
Solution
After evaluating the market, Natgraph selected SAP Business One deployed on Ascarii’s AWS cloud platform. Warren Hatfield, Financial Controller, was very keen on the cloud deployment model as it avoids the substantial investment in servers and on-premise infrastructure, and it will make their potential premises move easier in the future. Warren said, “the AWS platform is secure and reputable; there seems to be a lot of movement towards the AWS cloud platform as it is seen to be the safe and secure option. We’re also looking at longevity and we felt that we would get better support working with a global cloud provider.”
Benefits
One of the benefits Warren has noticed from accessing SAP Business One on Ascarii’s AWS cloud platform is its speed and that all employees can access it from anywhere. Having chosen the SAP HANA version of SAP Business One, they were particularly keen on its familiar look and feel across different modules, as well as how intuitive it is to use. Natgraph also uses B1 Usability Package from Boyum IT alongside SAP Business One, which enables them to adapt the solution to fit their needs. Warren said, “I really like the way we can customise SAP Business One using B1 Usability Package – it means we can build new functionality into SAP Business One, making it more customisable to fit around what we want it to do.”
The team at Natgraph are very positive about the working relationship with Ascarii and felt that Ascarii’s consultants really understood what they were asking for from a business perspective and were able to translate those requirements into how SAP Business One would work for them. Managers were really keen on Ascarii’s discovery process, which they found very thorough and meant that Ascarii’s team understood what they wanted. Warren said, “Ascarii’s consultants have a really good understanding of people, as well as systems, and made our team feel comfortable with what they’re doing and how SAP Business One fits into our workplace environment.”