Utopia Furniture Ltd, based in Wolverhampton, designs and manufactures bathroom furniture in their state-of-the-art manufacturing facility. With longevity in mind, they use the finest, most sustainable materials to craft furniture of the highest quality.
By 2019, Wolverhampton-based Utopia Furniture was becoming aware that its existing manufacturing and commercial system was becoming a risk to the business. Developed in-house, heavily customised over the past 20+ years and written in a language called Omnis7 around an Oracle database, only limited people in the business knew how to maintain it, and the servers on which it ran were close to end-of-support and becoming unreliable.
What was needed was a modern ERP system, appropriate for a manufacturing business of Utopia’s size, and with a rich set of capabilities offered by current generation software systems.
Accordingly, the search for such a system began.
Utopia’s core team spoke to several ERP vendors, attended a number of ERP events and studied the various systems on offer.
A manufacturer of made-to-order bathroom furniture, Utopia had complex needs in terms of routings, bills of materials and delivery sequencing. Its furniture is delivered ready-built – rather than flatpacked – and is shipped on its own transport fleet. Planned deliveries are put through a route optimiser, sequenced and furniture is then manufactured in that same sequence.
While the current system supported that process, Utopia was also aware that modern ERP systems offered much more, and consequently evaluated the suitability of competing ERP systems’ shopfloor data capture and capacity planning capabilities.
As Utopia’s market research progressed, Exel Computer Systems’ EFACS E/8 ERP system emerged as the preferred solution. In February 2021, a contract to deploy it was consequently signed.
There were several reasons for this, explains Russell Hardwick, Utopia’s head of customer experience and IT support.
First, Exel had been impressed with Utopia’s demanding requirements in terms of a proof of delivery capability and had agreed to co-fund development work to extend its own existing capabilities in this regard.
Second, EFACS E/8 was web-based, offering ease of access on a wide range of devices and platforms.
Third, EFACS E/8 came with customisation tools that allowed a considerable amount of customisation – if customisation was required it could be carried out by Utopia’s own developers.
And finally, Exel Computer Systems is based in the UK, reasonably close by, had authored the solution itself and as of 2025, has been in existence for 40 years.
“In short, the business had a high degree of comfort that whatever support it needed, it would quickly be forthcoming,” sums up Hardwick.
Originally intended as a largely internal project, implementation timescales and resourcing needed a significant rethink when a number of personnel issues arose.
“Some businesses might have killed the project at that point,” observes Hardwick. “Instead, the attitude of senior management was that what had happened simply highlighted the risk that the business was facing by relying on the existing systems.”
Accordingly, Hardwick himself was recruited to join the business and was assigned the role of project manager, initially tasked with talking to every department and function within the business, in order to understand how it operated, and what functionality was needed from EFACS E/8.
During this time, Hardwick recalls being impressed by the can-do attitude of the department managers and their teams who were up for the challenge, keen to support the business in making the implementation a success.
In parallel, Exel was hard at work in the background, developing the proof-of-delivery software and undertaking the preparatory IT work that Utopia’s own internal resource could no longer undertake.
“Exel hadn’t planned on being asked to support us with that preparatory work, and we were grateful that they made people available for us when workloads permitted,” recalls Hardwick. “Very quickly, we came to the realisation that the system integration challenge had been underestimated, as had the amount of testing required. We did a lot of testing, using real data in simulations and parallel running exercises and learned lot from every test.”
One significant piece of learning – during implementation, is that it would be Exel’s largest-ever implementation, in terms of component parts, bills of materials and complexity.
By September 2023, everything was ready. But at that point, says Hardwick, the business was just three months away from its financial year end, and was reluctant to spread the financial year across two different systems.
“So, we began a three-month parallel run,” explains Hardwick. “Every incoming order was entered into both systems and we homed in on the detailed operation of individual processes and aspects of manufacturing. It wasn’t live, but it was very, very close to being live.”
And so, in January 2024, on the first day back at work after the Christmas break, the EFACS E/8 system did go live. Such was the degree of confidence in the preparations and ability of all staff to make it happen that there were no Exel personnel present on site, unlike with many other EFACS E/8 go lives.
“We were pretty sure that we’d nailed it – and so were Exel” sums up Hardwick
Very quickly, it became apparent that EFACS E/8 was indeed delivering on the expectations that the business had for it. EFACS E/8’s shopfloor data capture capability, for instance, resulted in a lot of efficiencies, as well as providing much greater visibility into factory floor operations and work-in-progress.
“We were fairly fast-moving before, but realised that we could probably go even faster – and now we are,” says Hardwick.
Similarly, loading product data into the software is now much faster. Previously, he relates, it could take days or even weeks to load parts, bills of materials and routings into the system. Now, doing this takes a matter of minutes.
EFACS E/8 also delivered a number of productivity improvements related to planning and processing – the former system had required a team of three people to produce all the production paperwork, sequence orders through the factory, print labels and match labels to paperwork. None of that is required now, explains Hardwick – sequencing happens automatically and paperwork and labels are printed on demand, at a departmental or individual operator level.
Importantly, the business’s implementation strategy proved to be correct. The focus had been to implement EFACS E/8 in as standard a way as possible and only then tweak or change any aspects that needed refining.
“The idea had been to avoid spending time and resources on ‘nice to have’ capabilities that users said they wanted, but which weren’t true pain points,” explains Hardwick. Now, with the standard EFACS E/8 system in place, future developments will enhance it – with a mobile CRM capability already being planned for early implementation.
EFACS E/8’s reporting capabilities were another win, he adds. The data structure of the previous system made it difficult to use. Now, Utopia has actually recruited a Microsoft Power BI specialist in order to fully leverage the Microsoft Power BI reporting suite. Senior management are impressed with the detail available from the system.
“We now understand so much more about what’s going on across the entire business – and with those new insights, we’re generating even more efficiencies and improvements,” sums up Hardwick. “Overall, we feel that EFACS E/8 has unlocked a host of opportunities right across the business – it really has been as transformational as we had hoped.”
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