BT Europe, the forklift truck
manufacturing division of Toyota, has begun replacing its heavily
customised Movex application with the latest version from
Lawson Software.
The company said the upgrade was needed to rein in spiralling
software customisation costs. Marcus Svanberg, programme manager
for enterprise resource planning at Toyota Industries, said full
roll-out of the system would take until the end of 2008, but it was
a necessary process to get under way.
The company originally customised the ERP system in 1996 to
match its business more closely, but supporting the custom software
has become increasingly costly and difficult.
"The helpdesk staff had to understand our version, and we had to
use our own original consultants," said Svanberg. He said that with
the latest Java-based Lawson M3 5.2 version of the software, the
functionality BT Europe had built in now came as standard.
The company will use the Lawson M3 software for its sales,
service and distribution operations, involving 1,400 employees in
16 countries, and Svanberg is planning to control the application
centrally.
The system will help the company manage business in several
markets with a higher degree of coordination. It will also improve
employee access to information regarding key business processes,
which will help improve efficiency and customer service and provide
tools that can help increase profitability and growth, said
Svanberg.
"Our aim is to harmonise business processes across Europe and
control how the system is configured," he said.
The M3 software will be run on an IBM AS/400 server hosted by
IBM in Sweden. It will communicate with BT Europe's JD Edwards
production system (now called Oracle Enterprise One) and Baan
Salesplus software.
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