New Zealand exports are winning bigger shares of world markets. This means good business for leading New Zealand plastics manufacturer Vertex that supplies products to key New Zealand exporters as well as offshore customers.

To help manage and sustain its growth Vertex recently signed a contract to license and implement Lawson's Movex e-collaboration solution throughout its operations.

Implementation of the full suite of Movex is slated for completion on 1 June 2002. The enterprise system will serve 150 users.

Once part of the Carter Holt Harvey group of companies, Vertex is now an independent company owned by Pacific Equity Partners and Senior Management.

Vertex Pacific Limited is a leading Australasian manufacturer of rigid plastic packaging for the industrial, food, food service and animal health industries.

Products include drums, bottles, jerry cans, salad containers, disposable cups, cake domes and hinged food containers as well as vaccinators and other animal health applicators. It is the only manufacturer of foam presentation products in New Zealand and holds the major market share. It also holds a strong position in the industrial chemical, dairy, household products and horticultural segments.

The company's customers are divided into four sectors: industrial products, dairy packaging, food trays and technical components (the latter manufacturing applicators for animal health treatments and a new venture into human health providing sleep apnea treatment systems for Fisher & Paykel Healthcare)

According to Vertex Information Technology Manager, Dee Ankersmit, after the sale of the business by Carter Holt Harvey (primarily a forestry-based business) in October 2000, Vertex sought a core system that was separate from Carter Holt Harvey's centralised SAP application that Vertex is currently using.

Why Inentia's Movex?

The company saw this as an opportunity to gain a system that would be appropriate for a manufacturer and distributor of plastic products, one that required fewer resources to manage and provided a high degree of user control.

"Our business objectives for a new core system included the elimination of manual processes,  streamlining the workflow from receipt of raw materials to distributing the finished product delivered by a system that could be implemented on time and on budget.

"The Movex implementation will help manage the transition from an entity within a large corporate to a more focused and decentralised operation.

"We reviewed solutions from SAP, PeopleSoft and Lawson. Overall, we believe Movex provides a broader range of cost-effective functionality combined with relevant features such as advanced production planning and business warehouse compared to the current SAP configuration.

Vertex has a considerable manufacturing operation that involves 3500 SKUs, 1500 sales orders per month servicing some 880 customers.

"As a business of mainly high volume continuous-process manufacturing Vertex needs to constantly maintain efficiency.  Movex is very strong in manufacturing  - our core business. We also anticipate benefit to be gained from functionality such as the Product Configurator that will allow us to more easily deliver on customer-specified items for our Technical Injection part of the business. In the past, such tailoring would mean delays in setting up data for new items before being able to confirm our ability to meet this customer demand.

"The product's advanced planning tools will also assist us to better manage our various manufacturing processes which can involve some 95 different machines, each requiring several distinct tools for our various products, which in turn may have different sizes and colours.

 "This places considerable demand on our ability to schedule machine set up changes and other events such as routine maintenance and longer leadtimes for imported materials.

"Consequently, we look forward to functionality from Movex's Plant Maintenance module to have integration between scheduling machine maintenance and production requirements.

"Additionally, as a Java-based system Movex will provide us with a very good backbone for doing business in the future," Mr Ankersmit said.

According to Steve Ironside, Managing Director Lawson, "We are very pleased to welcome Vertex into the Lawson community and we are confident that Movex will provide the company with a very strong collaborative solution that will help the organisation manage and build on its sustained growth. The Lawson teams looks forward to working with Vertex to ensure a successful project outcome."

Vertex is scheduled to go live with Movex by 1 June 2002.