Business Imperative
In 2014, Dartford-based Safetell recognised that the business systems on which it depended were no longer adequate for its needs.
A manufacturer and installer of security solutions such as bullet-resistant doors and partitions, and attack-resistant screens for use in banks, it required tight integration between the manufacturing system, which orchestrated the production of its products, and the field service system that managed the subsequent installation.
Safetell’s Pegasus Opera manufacturing system, in use for almost 20 years, was based on Microsoft’s Visual FoxPro database language. Tesseract, the company’s field service management system, was SQL-based and more modern. But the two systems were not properly integrated and required complex and manually-intensive data feeds in order to communicate at all.
“There was a lot of manual data entry, with a significant potential for error,” recalls Andy Norris, Safetell’s IT Manager. “Coupled to a significant increase in business activity, it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep the two systems synchronised.”