Speedy Hire, the tool and equipment hire company has selected Microsoft Axapta from IT services group Touchstone in an order valued at £4.5 million. It will provide customers with a more streamlined, efficient service, to reduce transaction costs and improve access to management information. Philip Stride, Managing Director of Touchstone Global told FSN that the deal, made up of approximately £1.5 in software and £3m in services, hardware and infrastructure is the largest in Touchstone's history.
Stride told FSN that Touchstone's acquisition of Global, around 18 months earlier had been pivotal to the decision, "Global was in the hire business but had built a specific hire and rental product based on Axapta, through the IT part of its business. When we bought Global, we gained the software product and several people with deep knowledge of the hire and rental business."
With 2,700 staff across 300 UK-wide depots, servicing approximately 60,000 customers, rapidly growing national hire firm Speedy provides a range of equipment hire services to UK contractors and builders, industry, utilities and the public sector, operating from over 300 depots throughout the country. In order to manage the levels of growth expected, Speedy identified the need to streamline processes and eliminate paper from their sales and customer management processes.
Implemented by Touchstone, the Microsoft Axapta ERS (Enterprise Rental System) will allow customers to rent equipment in a highly flexible way including online ordering, as well as providing a more efficient financial management information system, eliminating the need for paper-based billing and reporting and offering significant operational efficiencies. The solution will also provide a single interface for Speedy's staff to check availability of rental equipment across the company's more than 300 regionally-based depots, which will in turn allow the organisation to have a more accurate view of stock requirements across the business.
"We needed a single, unified system to provide a more streamlined service to our 60,000 customers across the UK , as well as help Speedy track and reduce operational costs." explained Paul Awati, IT manager at Speedy. "We considered SAP and Oracle, but they don't have the specific hire functionality we wanted. Touchstone was able to provide hire industry knowledge and the best technology, as well as the best professional and project management capabilities available. The flexibility of Microsoft Axapta also means that we can easily add extra functionality to the system without changing the underlying technology, providing customers with bespoke services quickly and effectively. There is nothing else in the rental market that offers us this flexibility."
Awati also told FSN that having Microsoft behind the deal was an important factor, "Touchstone are bigger than our previous supplier supplier which is helpful but having Microsoft involved provided us with more comfort. There are plenty of suppliers out there who are familiar with Axapta".
The initial phase of the project will be implemented at one of Speedy's regional centres, and is likely to be completed by March 2006, before being rolled out to over 1,000 users in 300 depots across the UK . The wider roll-out of the project is expected to take a further twelve months to complete.
