Gresham Power Electronics

rost 16/04/2020 11:14:02

Success Stories

Discrete Manufacturing

Customer: Gresham Power Electronics

K8 MFS software is the perfect fit for Gresham Power Electronics

For more than 50 years, Salisbury based Gresham Power Electronics Ltd has specialised in designing and manufacturing bespoke naval power conversion and distribution equipment for the marine defence industry – in the UK and worldwide.

“Our equipment is deployed by the Royal Navy as well as many foreign navies,” explained Director of Operations & Defence Business, Karen Jay. “everything we build is usually bespoke to an individual class ship. All our equipment is hand built and we have no automated processes at all. Following customer approval of our designs, we then manufacture prototypes and deliverables. Some products take several months to build and test, and the equipment may go through shock, vibration and EMC testing. It’s therefore critical for us to understand what our project costs are from start to finish. And, because we must support our products for 25 years, it’s crucial we have traceability of every component used for when the equipment comes back to us for servicing and cleaning, as well as for tight engineering control.”

Gresham Power chose K8 MFS software to manage their business processes after their incumbent supplier was no longer able to provide support to their 20-year-old system. “The old DOS based system had been updated with a Windows interface which looked quite user friendly but was anything but,” remembered Karen. “It was such a struggle to get to the information we needed quickly and impossible to extract data for reporting. It was also impossible to delete obsolete parts and the system was getting really clogged up as data cleansing was far too time consuming. We did however have plenty of warning that we would need to upgrade so we had time to look at a number of systems.”

Karen said that the ability of a system to calculate ‘actual’ costs was a key requirement as they seldom made the same piece of equipment twice. “Calculations based on standard or average costs just don’t work for us. We also needed to be able to export all of our existing data to any new system because of the very long-term support we provide. We eventually chose K8 MFS because it provided the costing model we needed, and the team reassured us they could successfully extract all our data. The Kerridge Commercial Systems (KCS) team were also able to train us using our own data. This made it far easier to check the data fields imported were correct, as our users were working with familiar data. Virtually every other provider we looked at only offered on-line training with documentation that didn’t match what you could see on their videos - with dummy data that bore no relevance to our business.”

“The software is also very intuitive to use, and the Financial Controller and I decided it was just what we needed. As a small company it was a big undertaking to implement a new system and we don’t have the luxury of an IT department helping us out. It’s now used in every part of our business – for material control, purchasing, sales, engineering and finance. The integrated accounting is also a big bonus.”

Most importantly the KCS implementation team were very focused on giving us exactly what we wanted in the way the system was configured. Their ongoing support throughout the project gave us confidence we would get a system that was right for us.

- Karen Jay, Director of Operations & Defence Business