Stannah looks to enterprise cloud software to lift IT systems

Stairlift and lift manufacturer Stannah Group said it has made a “significant investment” in a cloud-based enterprise software roll-out to modernise its IT systems and prepare for the company’s future growth.

Stannah is one of the UK’s leading engineering companies, and remains an independent, family-owned and run business that has sold over 700,000 stairlifts worldwide. It now operates in more than 40 countries, and has subsidiaries in 12 countries, including France, Italy and the US.

The company will be rolling out IFS Cloud for enterprise resource planning (ERP), field service management (FSM), planning and scheduling optimisation (PSO), and enterprise asset management (EAM).

The implementation of IFS Cloud will enable Stannah to replace an existing legacy system and 67 edge systems with the new enterprise offering, which will provide real-time visibility across company departments.

Stannah said that, for the first time, all of its employees across 13 countries will be aligned on a “modern and cohesive solution” that consolidates all of Stannah’s operational functions from manufacturing to field service management. When fully rolled out, the new system will support over 2,500 users.

Nick Stannah, joint CEO of Stannah Home Accessibility, said this is a major project for Stannah, and a keystone of a new IT strategy to modernise the Stannah Group’s whole IT estate.

“Our legacy systems have served us well, but we have grown considerably over the past decade and plan to build on that,” he said. “We have a lot of technical debt in many legacy systems, and infrastructure that is not joined up and no longer fit for purpose,” he told Computer Weekly.

Stannah said the group also has a lot of international businesses running separate systems and needs to move to a globally integrated enterprise-wide IT platform that can better support its business growth plans.

“Our new IT strategy aims to ensure that IT is an enabler for the Group to achieve its future business objectives,” he said. “Moving to cloud services, and modernising our whole infrastructure, enables us to achieve this, providing scalability, flexibility and security for our growing business.”

Stannah said the company had selected IFS as its cloud ERP provider after a “very thorough” selection process during 2023. “IFS’s evergreen cloud solution means we can keep modernising our platform as technology evolves,” he said, adding that IFS is a strong fit for Stannah because it can provide the range of functionality the company requires, “providing very capable solutions for our manufacturing and field service operations”.

The company is at the very start of this project, and is currently at the planning stage. “This will be a considerable undertaking,” he said.

It has created a team of dedicated people from across the business to see the project through, and will be working through audits of current systems to assess business needs and processes before working on training every member of staff on the system.

Phase one of the roll-out is likely to go live around January 2026, when Stannah will deploy it across its manufacturing plants as well as all of its UK and France trading businesses. Phase two will see the roll-out of the system across all of the company’s other international businesses over the following two years.