Afek I.S. has completed an
ERP project in Beri Print.
Beri Print is one of the largest
printing companies in Israel and has a variety of printing and computer related
activities.
Beri Print’s management has chosen to fully
implement the Israeli ERP solution Priority. The project in this case
included a full implementation of the financial and logistic modules:
marketing, sales, acquisition, stock, and manufacturing. It also included a
specially developed module that allows an administrative division to two companies
in the financial implementation, which does not affect the logistic modules.
Afek I.S. has managed this project
from the preliminary consulting
stage, through the implementation stage, up until and including its successful
conclusion and ongoing support. During the project work methodologies, that have
proven their worth in similar projects in the past, have been used.
A special team of developers
and implementers was put together for this project, managed by Mrs.
Einat Meizel, who is in charged of the ERP activity in Afek.
Printing Everything
Mrs. Ora Oz – the I.S. manager in
Beri Print elaborates on the project: “Beri Print is 50 years old. It’s a
leading company in the printing field in Israel and it specializes in printing
documents that have been personalized. There are different types of documents
that may need personalization. For example: cheques, document for direct
mailing, all the cellular companies billing, cable companies’ bills, and credit
companies’ statements to their clients, such as Leumi-card’ and Isracard’.
The company is also in charge of
printing the new driving licenses with pictures and the credit cards for some of
the credit card companies.
“What characterizes
our products is that we create a data structure, receive data from our clients,
produce the personalized product and pass it to the end customer via mail or to
our costumer who sees to the distribution to its customers. Accordingly we consider
our company to be a market leader both technology and professionally.
“We have products which we produce
as a digital print, and here we use a world leading technology. It mostly
concerns documents that citizens don’t like to receive.
“Our company is actually very
technology based, but our information technology structure is divided in two.
The computerization structure is physically made up from two nets. The first is
the administrative net which is open to the world and contains the information
system. All the Priority (the ERP system) modules are on this net. The second
net, which is the data net, is isolated from the outside world. Into this net we
receive the vast amounts of data from our clients and from it we produce our
documents.
The project we’re currently discussing is in fact the
management information system. We have several means in which we receive data in
to this net. We are talking about considerable amounts of data. For example each
mailing project for a major credit card company requires
a great deal of data to accomplish.
Beri is a large company which
employs about 300 people.
Strategically wise, we
focus on technologies that will enable us to produce sophisticated and
advanced products. These technologies are a strategic asset to us, and we invest in R&D in this
field.
In order to manufacture with
digital print a data processing ability is needed for the sophisticated end
product.
The fascinating thing is that you
want, for example, to “slice” and fit the
coupons you send a client according to his consumer habits. That is something
you do in digital print and it requires information related technologies
recourses that are not insignificant – hardware and software both.
We’re a large and complex company
that can not be managed without an information system. In this case, you see, we
chose Priority and not Sap. We had no reason to choose Sap. We’re a local
company, we don’t have branches abroad and we didn’t think we needed to invest
in our information system as if it was our main strategic asset, which would
require Sap.
What did you give up on,
for example, by not choosing Sap?
We didn’t give up on anything. We
had a previous system, Adi-Adit, which belongs to Darom (a part of One today)
and is very common in companies in Kibutzes. This system is no longer being
developed so we had to choose a new information system to replace it. We reached
a point when there was a very large gap between our information needs and what
the system could supply us with. Since it was apparent that the system was at
the end of its life, we choose not to develop it further but to replace it. The
new system is able to accomplish everything the previous system did, and in
addition to that a number of problems we had with the previous system have been
solved.
The new system provides accounting
services, and this time around we are putting the system to better use. With
this new system we are also able to manage our acquisition, marketing &
sales, production and logistic – shipments and warehouses - needs.
All in all the system is working
well in the two months since it’s been operational, there are still things that
need to be refined. At the moment we started by organizing the users in the
managerial level. We started to build executive reports. There is a data
warehouse project we plan to accomplish that will require a transfer of data
from the previous system to the current one, in order to preserve the data that
has been accumulated during the last seven years. We need at least one more work
year in order to be able to retrieve information in such a way that will serve
all the levels in the organization.
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