Resene Paints, New Zealand’s largest privately owned and operated paint manufacturing company has experienced huge growth in recent years. As it has expanded, the original sales driven organisation found itself needing to deal with new sources of information from its sizable manufacturing, distribution and retail operations.

General manager, Resene Paints, Nick Nightingale says the company needed a partner to help Resene run the entire business with one software application.

Lawson, a provider of enterprise software to the mid-market sector, proved to be that partner.

“It’s important for us to have a package which will help all our business elements. Whichever company and package we invested in had to be able to cope with our increasing number of outlets, and our manufacturing and distribution operations. Plus we had a desire to move all our processes onto a central server,” Nightingale says. “Lawson could provide us with this solution through Movex.”

Movex is Lawson’s suite of collaboration enterprise applications for the design, management and control of business operations in the manufacturing, maintenance and distribution industries.

Managing Director, Lawson, Steve Ironside says Movex is designed to make business processes more efficient.

“We set out to adapt Movex to Resene’s particular application needs for their sales, marketing, logistics, production, maintenance, finance and human resources requirements.”

In February 2003, Resene started implementing phase one of Lawson’s Movex V12 package. Stage one involved stock management and distribution order processing.

“We decided to tackle stock management first as it was seen to be an area that needed to be addressed quickly and one where the company saw benefits quickly appear,” Nightingale says.

Lawson and Resene’s team worked alongside each other on the implementation project. The Resene team included a project manager and three process owners for the Financial Management, Customer Order Processing and Procurement areas of the business. As the rollout progressed, additional key users came on board as needed to support the process owners.

Lawson provided a project team to support the Resene team structure, including a project manager and several business consultants.

To date, Resene has completed the first two phases of its implementation, the sales and distribution and financials phases. It is already seeing huge business benefits mainly in the areas of planning, warehousing and distribution.

“Thanks to the Movex package the stock position and sales and distribution processes are now placing demand on a single source inventory, as a result, the distribution function is now able to cope with larger volumes. The control and accuracy of inventory has greatly improved,” says Nightingale.

“The integration of the stock system with the financials is also proving to be a major benefit, as we can now view stock transactions nationwide and see the financial impact these are having.

“The Lawson software package also allows us to be flexible and use the material to suit our internal structure and communication channels,” added Nightingale.

Stage three of the Movex project involves implementing the product lifecycle management (formulations/bill of materials life cycle), production planning and the manufacturing execution processes.

Movex is now being rolled out to Resene’s subsidiaries, Altex Coatings (Marine paint specialist) and Resene Automotive Performance Coatings.

“We’re taking the lessons from implementing Movex and are applying these to the other Resene businesses. For example, we’re likely to implement financial and customer order processing in a separate stage to distribution and manufacturing,” Nightingale says.

Now that Resene has the internal skills required to implement the financials and customer Order processes, the company is using a phased approach to replacing legacy systems with Lawson.

“We’re delighted with the way Resene is using the package, used it to fit the business’s structure and organisational requirements and seen beneficial results and as a result,” says Ironside.

Resene in now rolling out the lessons learnt from the Lawson Movex model to all other retail outlets, and is raising the bar on customer sales and service.

May 2005