Switching to a new ERP package was no unnecessary luxury for Spectro, producer of chemical cleaning agents for professional cleaning. "As a company, you want to be ready for the future. SAP Business One really proved to be a catalyst of new developments for us in this."

Cathelijn van der Meijden is a back office employee at Spectro and the first point of contact for the 25 employees using SAP Business One. She supervised the transition to the new ERP package in 2018: a combination of SAP Business One and ProcessForce.

Strict regulations

Until then, Spectro was using HeartProfit, a widely used ERP system in the chemical industry.

"The reason for switching was actually the increasingly stringent regulations. More and more is being asked of chemical companies in terms of safety, quality control and traceability. HeartProfit was lagging behind in this, we felt.

We wanted to digitize several things in our company at once, and we were looking for an ERP package that would tie together various parts of our business. We found that in the combination of SAP Business One with ProcessForce."

Thoroughly

Spectro tackled the transition thoroughly. The company uses modules for production, CRM, financial administration, quality control, logistics and traceability. Even mail traffic and phone calls are recorded.

"And our wish list is even longer: in time, we also want to take advantage of product and commodity scanning and automatic invoice recognition capabilities. There is still plenty to do!"

Part of what makes Spectro special is that more than 90% of their products are produced for private label. So a cleaning product can be labeled and packaged differently for different customers. For Van der Meijden, it was hugely important that the new ERP system could handle this large product variation.

90% of Spectro's products are produced private-label

Change of guard

Van der Meijden: "From the beginning, Logres was very thoughtful with us. You just notice that there are people working here who know the product inside out. That is very pleasant. We met our deadline of going live on April 1, despite a change of guard with the consultant working on our project from Logres.

Of course, it's never very pleasant when a consultant you're just getting used to leaves because he's taken on another job, but we got a good replacement in return who perhaps took things up even more energetically. So in the end, despite this minor setback, we are very satisfied with the project management during the project."

Despite setbacks during implementation, we are still satisfied with the project leadership.

Benevolent

Van der Meijden also appreciates in Logres the quick response time she experiences from the support desk when there are issues that need to be resolved. "The guys at the support desk are very sympathetic.

In principle, I think we should be able to solve problems ourselves in the first instance. But the internal rule is that we try for 10 minutes and if it still doesn't work we give a call. Sometimes a tip is enough to point us in the right direction. The system is intuitive enough that we can then work it out on our own."

Profit

Van der Meijden: "Going live with SAP Business One has made us stronger as a company. It has proven to be a catalyst for other innovations. We started thinking about things differently.

SAP Business One made us think about things differently.

The way in which SAP Business One is set up, for example, has caused us to think differently about our internal structure and division of labor. We didn't see that coming beforehand.

For me personally, the biggest gain is that everything is a lot faster and that I can compare and adjust everything in 1 screen. No, I wouldn't want to go back..."