As we approach our half year, it’s time for another business update.

 

The last few months have been a whirlwind for the new business sales team with 5 deals closed in 4 months and Chris tells me that more good news is on the way with the team hopeful of closing a couple more in the next month or so.

This is fantastic news and means that we were ahead of budget at the end of April and are forecasting to be ahead of budget at the end of May (our half year).

We are still some way behind target for service revenue so the uplift in software sales is a real boost.

The deals so far are:

• Platts Agriculture – a market-leading animal bedding supplier based in North Wales. Anthony Payne and Chris Burnett secured this win over some tough competition, including SAP Business 1. They selected NexSys due to our understanding of their business needs and demonstrating how our SYSPRO solution would address the problems and add real value to their business. The deal is worth over £280k and they will be using the following solutions – SYSPRO, Automail, DSW, Bartender, SYSPRO MOM, Translution.
• Plastic Extruders –. Plastic Extruders Ltd often known as Plastex is a small privately owned Manufacturing Company approaching its 60th year making extruded Plastic products. They are an existing customer of K3 IBS who have been using the IBS system since around 1990, however, were now looking for a new modern system with improved functionality and better integration. Their long standing relationship with the IBS team supported Kim Davies’ bid to win in their business. The deal is worth over 100k and they will be using: SYSPRO, MTD, DatsSwitch and Automail
• WHS Plastics – a family owned plastic products company established in 1933 operating from one large site in Minworth and two satellite sites in Runcorn and Egypt. WHS Plastics are a tier one supplier to Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), their plastic injection presses manufacture the front grills, door mirror housings and spare wheel cover for most JLR Products. They selected NexSys due to the flexibility demonstrated in Syspro to meet all of their complex requirements. Martyn Ivey secured this win worth over 500k. They will be using DataSwitch, Orchard, SYSPRO MOM MTD, Automail and Bartender – we also have a quotation under consideration for Equator which will run alongside the ERP project if we are successful.
• Rautomead – the world’s leading and most experienced supplier of continuous casting technology for non-ferrous alloys. Another IBS customer who wanted to maintain the K3 relationship based on their experience with the IBS team. Just before leaving K3. Rhodri secured a deal worth over £100k, subject to the success of an initial planning phase.
• Ribble Cycles – Ribble Cycles is one of the oldest brands in cycling and has been a leading innovator in the evolution of the modern bicycle since 1897. From its earliest beginnings during the Victorian era to its position today as a cutting-edge manufacturer of British-built, market-leading bicycles. Ribble operates from 6 stores around the UK and has a large on-line presence where customers configure their bike to their specification. They have already provided a purchase order and the contracts worth over £300k are in the process of being finalised.

Please note: Please do not share this news outside of the business yet as we don’t have permission and some are still being processed

K3 IBS:-

The IBS team continue to do well and are already over 20% ahead of budget to the end of April.
Well done to Jane, Chris, Sue, Tracey and Colin.

Marketing:-

As you know we are planning a summer party and a celebration of our 40 years on Thursday 29th June. This has now been booked and will take place at the Alchemist in Salford Quays. More details to follow.

Customer event – We are currently finalising plans for the customer event but haven’t yet selected a venue. The date is likely to be Thursday 7th November but this may changed due to venue availability.

Customer contact – Ruth, Lorraine and Kelly are currently in the process of contacting all customers to update databases and gauge where they are in terms of NPS scoring.

 

Other Events

Today we attend another IT Showcase in Brighton. We have  4 meetings booked with companies who have an ERP project.  Next one is in Sheffield on 6th June.

On 7th and 8th June we are attending Manufacturing and Engineering Week, which is a two day event that brings manufacturers together for a festival of innovation featuring a dynamic, interactive series of digital and live events to inspire, inform and entertain. Covering the full product life cycle from design, engineering, manufacturing and maintenance, it truly celebrates the sector, flying the flag for manufacturing and engineering in the UK. We are on stand L60 and will be showcasing NexSys, SYSPRO and our IP solutions.

Webinars

As you know we host webinars monthly to our customers which you are also welcome to join. You can also access the webinars on our YouTube channel. 

Our SYSPRO 8 webinar in March was very popular with 78 registrations and 47 attendees. Great work from Darshnee on putting these webinars together. Last months webinar covered Docuware as part of our agreement with them for sponsoring last years customer event. This months webinar on Thursday 18th May is on Automation and Integration – an update on DataSwitch. You can register here.

Next months webinar is a introduction to SYSPRO’s Application Designer. More information and registration here.

Campaigns

The first of our campaigns is live ‘A practical guide to improving productivity and efficiency in manufacturing‘ which is a whitepaper consisting of 7 chapters and two customer case studies. Take a look at the landing page here that Molly has created and download the chapters as they become available each week.

Content

More new content available on the website and social media so please keep a look and help by sharing our posts on LinkedIn. Recent new content includes. ERP for 2023: embracing Digitisation to Build Resilience and Maximise Performance, Exploiting the Power of ERP to Build Supply Chain Resilience and introducing our new whitepaper campaign  NexSys Launches Manufacturing Productivity Guide

 

Case Studies

Labcold have finally signed off their case study with us as have Alexander Dennis which was written for the whitepaper we mentioned above.

Sales:-

I’ve already covered off the new business in this newsletter but we need to also recognise the hard work of the account management team.

When we have a lull in new business they have always managed to prop up the business by winning significant contracts with our existing customers.

We have lost some experience from this team in the last few months with Danielle and more recently Rhodri with the rest of the team supplemented with Bev’s recent move, shouldering the burden during continuing challenging economic times.

There are some very exciting opportunities being worked on within the base at the moment and if (when) these land it will provide another boost to both software and service revenue for the business.

Exciting times, congratulations to the entire sales team.

Operations:-

SYSPRO continue to update their certifications and in order to maintain our Elite partner grading, we need to remain current. The consultants have been doing their bit to support our grading by passing some level 3 certifications.

Well done to:
o Zain – Distribution.
o Karen – Finance and Distribution.
o Gary B – Finance.
o Gary H – Administration, Distribution, Enterprise reporting and Analysis, SYSPRO 7 user systems administrator.

The influx of new business means that the projects team now have a rush on to get projects started in order to fill up the diaries and build plans to meet any key go live target dates.

This alongside managing the delivery of the on-going business including upgrades.

• Since the last newsletter we have taken quite a few customers live on SYSPRO 8.
o Huddersfield Royal Infirmary – SYSPRO 8 Upgrade
o M-CNC – New Implementation
o Edward Pryor – SYSPRO 8 Upgrade
o Bailey and Mackey – Equator Payroll – New Implementation
o BPW – TransLution Implementation
o Aerotron – New Implementation
o Orthoplastics – SYSPRO 8 Upgrade
o Bowyer Engineering – SYSPRO 8 Upgrade
o Drive Devilbliss – SYSPRO 8 Upgrade (Goes live Monday).

Well done to everyone involved in these projects and successful go lives.

In the last newsletter, I underlined the need to tighten up our controls, scope management and most importantly, the specification of any area of customisation and integration.

New specification templates have been developed for each customisation area (DataSwitch, translution, Power Tailoring, SRS reports, Bartender Labels and Business Insights).

These are out for review with some of the teams and as soon as the feedback is received, they will become the templates for ALL custom developments including the recent new business.

Product:-

The next SYSPRO release looks likely to be delayed but that’s not yet official. The Insider program for the new release has been launched and we have already ‘volunteered’ for QMS.

SYSPRO 8 adoption is now at a tipping point with almost 50% of sites already live on 8. We had a record last year with almost an upgrade per week and the pace continues with even more to come.

Any site already on 8 considering applying an update should always look at this site before moving to a new release as each one has nuances to plan for: https://www.nexsys.co.uk/syspro-8-update-request/

Development:-

Equator
Some progress on clocking with getting the new Suprema clocks talking to the Facial Recognition API. This is required for Scotts Bakery.

Orchard

Flexicon and Europa are currently testing the latest 2023.1 release and we are also working on making the installation and upgrade process as painless as possible..

Dataswitch
We are busy building out the IIoT platform and working on some migration work from .NET Framework to .NET Core.

Craig & Declan
The new version of Company copy is out and being installed, the Stock code replace has a new look and will be available soon and the MTD Currency Extender now available in the MTD product as its own application.

People:-

Rhodri left us within the last few weeks, we thank him for his hard work and wish him well in his new role.

Maurice Gomez has now joined Ricky’s team so we can officially welcome Maurice to the NexSys team. Welcome on board Maurice.

Molly Gill, Digital Marketing Executive has passed her probation period. Great news Molly

Joshua Naidoo is attending his graduation on Thursday achieving Bcom in Business informatics, days after completing the Manchester Marathon in a very impressive 3 hours and 46 minutes. Congratulations to Joshua, here’s hoping there aren’t too many steps to climb to collect his diploma after his marathon efforts.

Jay Jackson has been awarded North West Referee of the year by Basketball England congratulations to Jay, here’s hoping that he actually receives the Award and it’s not ruled out by VAR 😊

In other news:-

It’s been nearly a year since we went live with CloudBlue, and although we know it still has some improvements to be made, it has already provided us with a much more collaborative solution. The data is much more accessible to provide more meaningful outputs and is assisting us in making better business decisions.

We have been testing the latest release (V31) and will be rolling this into live in the coming weeks.

This release brings a number of bug fixes and improved functionality that has been raised since we went live in July last year. This improved functionality will bring efficiencies and increase productivity in sales and the start of the project process.

Following this release, we will be looking to continue to get your feedback through a series of workshops to ensure that the solution continues to support us as we push forward on our growth plan.

Going forward, it’s critical that our data is kept up to date (Order Book, Schedules and CRM pipeline) and that we maximise the skills and resources we already have. We must also make sure that our forecasting is as accurate as possible so that we can foresee any future skills bottleneck in order to fill any gap with cross training or recruitment.

In order to fulfil what has already been sold and what we expect to close in the next few months, we will need to be flexible in approach and to ensure very tight control of all aspects of project scope and operational delivery.

We must minimise rework and cut out FOC as we will not have the bandwidth to do things twice.

As my old woodwork teacher used to tell me – measure twice, cut once.

Offices:-

The Manchester office continues to be open Tuesday to Thursday and accessible on demand Monday and Friday.
There is no further movement on the sale of the building, it will happen when it happens and I will share updates when there is something worth sharing.

I get the feeling that this (our 40th year) will be a very successful (and challenging in a good way) one.

Thanks everyone for your continuing support.

Best Regards.
Nick