Quenching a thirst for IT modernisation

Nichols is the company behind the iconic soft drink Vimto, the recipe for which was created more than 100 years ago in Blackburn, Lancashire.

Having undergone a major restructure in 2004, which saw its Nichols Foods business sold off and its manufacturing and distribution arms outsourced to third parties, the company has narrowed its focus to supplying soft drinks and dispensing systems. It now supplies Vimto, Panda and Sunkist to retail customers across the world, and dispensing systems to pubs and other forms of catering establishments.

Reducing the company’s staff from 850 people to 116 brought big changes to Nichols’ IT provision. Allan Doyle, Nichols’ group IT manager, says the implementation of Sage 1000 business management software in 2007 helped improve efficiency and remove business risk from its IT operations, particularly around customer relationship management (CRM).

What made Nichols install Sage 1000?
We had been looking to implement a CRM solution for some time. We looked at both Sage SalesLogix and Sage ACT but ended up writing our own CRM software because neither of those was suitable ­ ACT was too small for our needs and SalesLogix was too functionally rich.

We originally built our own intranet-based CRM system based on ASP.Net which interfaced with Sage Line 500. But we are not in the business of writing CRM software and I identified the in-house application as a business risk. This is because we had only one developer and though all his knowledge was documented, he was the only person who had that expertise.

Sage 1000 was a perfect replacement for that in-house application ­ it is a fully licensed CRM system which is supported by Sage.

What were you using before?
In the mid-1990s, we were using Tetra Chameleon. We moved to Tetra CS3, and after that we upgraded to Sage Line 500 in 2000, then Sage 1000 in 2007. In tho se days, CS3 was running on an IBM RS6000 AIX server using Unix and an Informix database. It would be an understatement to say it was a large and clunky beast that needed a lot of effort to change direction.

At about that time, Microsoft’s Windows Server 2000 operating system had just come along, and was getting much better reviews than Windows NT as a stable environment for business systems. In about 2002, we made a leap of faith from using Unix, Informix and 4GL programming languages to new Windows servers running on Intel processors with SQL databases.

What was the advantage of moving to Windows and SQL?
SQL skills were a lot more abundant in the industry and we could do much more with the database because we could do things more quickly.

Prior to this, we were reliant on waiting for 4GL programmers and resellers if we wanted to change direction and move the business forward by doing something different from a software perspective. Now we can write our own intranet applications that interface with the Sage environment.

What applications have you written to interface with Sage?

We have written about 30 applications for our intranet, including application programming interfaces (APIs) and SQL applets.

One is a purchase order requisition system developed with the ASP.Net web application framework, using the SQL back end running on Internet Information Server. This streamlines the system by passing information on goods automatically between our API and the supplier’s API so there is no need to send an invoice to be authorised beforehand.

We have also developed our own internal expenses system which has similar automated authentication functions. This involves emails being sent to the line manager who just clicks on a link to authorise them, then sends them back to the API which raises the purchase invoice.