Expert partnerships are the way forward to bring about economies of scale and efficiencies for business. That’s the message from the advanced system Enterprise Resource Planning company NexSys.
The company has teamed up with the UK-based business consultancy Anota to provide customers with seamless document management solutions which offer a better return on investment. Anota are the authorised reseller and implementer of DocuWare document management platform. The system handles the whole purchase-to-pay (P2P) documentation process from printing and scanning to workflow mapping and archiving.
NexSys spokesman Darren Edwards, Product Adoption Manager said by developing systems in close partnership, vendors with expertise in specific fields, such as document handling, can iron out syntax mismatches and data incompatibility to create fully integrated solution for the Industry 4.0 era.
He said: “Our industry is established to the extent that clients now expect clear, secure visibility of information, often across multi-level organisations. Subsystems therefore need to communicate seamlessly with each other and co-development between specialists makes this possible more quickly.
“Historically, ERP vendors and expert vendors in fields such as document management have worked to offer business solutions with a degree of crossover, but have approached it from quite different perspectives.
“We are currently working with Anota on an off the shelf solution that will bring about efficiencies and economies of scale for the motorhome manufacturer, Auto-Sleepers. The client has a number of companies, but the documents and data associated with them is accessible through SYSPRO wherever they are required in a context sensitive manner.”
Anota Sales Director, Antony Dickson said: “ Being able to offer seamless solutions to customers is one of the main benefits of this sort of partnership working. Our teams have become experts in the field and we are able to ensure there is no mismatch of systems. It has helped us to provide economies of scale for our clients and in turn helped their businesses become more efficient.”
An initial technical collaboration between Anota and NexSys led to a formal partnership of the two companies. The result has been a fully end-to-end system in which data moves efficiently in both directions, between documentation and ERP systems. For example, invoicing data generated though DocuWare can easily be extracted and assimilated into SYSPRO via its DataSwitch module.
Transactional data is lifted straight from documents and automatically uploaded to the ERP system. All delivery notes, purchase orders and other items are linked together, enabling any discrepancies to be called out for attention. No keying-in is needed, thereby reducing processing time, minimising margins for error and saving cost.
DocuWare automatically files documents based on criteria specified by the client, regardless of their source or format. This wide range includes not just paper and electronic documents but also items such as correspondence, email, CAD and spool files.
The system works across all aspects of the business from accounting, purchasing, productions and HR. It allows for all the information to be stored, shared and managed compliantly, simply and securely, with supporting electronic document workflows.
NexSys asserts that as businesses experience rapid growth and look to overarching solutions like SYSPRO ERP to transform supply, manufacturing and distribution functions, they can hit problems with legacy software tools. A good example is document management software, where communication with other systems can be problematic and potential operating efficiencies lost and inaccuracies introduced.
NexSys has traditionally been a provider of advanced ERP solutions for manufacturers and distributors throughout the UK and Europe. For many years, the company helped manufacturing companies to experience cost, time, and efficiency savings throughout the supply chain by automating processes and working smarter.
With the advent of Industry 4.0, the business recognised the potential to work closely with manufacturing and supply chain businesses through best-in-class technologies, to help businesses integrate the value chain, better understand customers, enhance automation, become more responsive, and facilitate a transformation to factories of the future. The business spent time developing its own tools to integrate SYSPRO and other applications to increase supply chain automation, adding systems integration and data manipulation tool DataSwitch, and HR solution Equator HR and APS to its product portfolio.
These products put NexSys in an exclusive market position to work closely with manufacturing and distribution businesses to create a truly connected manufacturing enterprise, with seamless integration of technologies across the supply chain.
