THE COMPANY

Prodrive is one of the world’s largest and most successful motorsport and technology businesses, employing over 500 staff at its Banbury headquarters and manufacturing facility in Milton Keynes. Best known for its long history in motorsport, in the last decade the company has diversified across a range of sectors with four, interconnected businesses: a motorsport division providing race and rally programmes for vehicle manufacturers and global brands; an engineering division creating innovative technology for the aerospace, defence and marine sectors; a division geared to the production of advanced lightweight composites and, finally, a bespoke clothing and accessory business.

THE CHALLENGE PRODRIVE FACED

During 2016, Prodrive required a complete IFS re-implementation at their two geographical locations with 11 IFS sites and 250 users.

Cedar Bay and Prodrive developed a programme to move from IFS 2003 to CORE Applications 9. The key issue was that the existing platform was unsupported at a technical and functional level, with many modifications to the old version being badly documented. Additionally, hardware and other elements of the infrastructure were also unsupported. It was vitally important to the company that the re-implementation improved the chart of accounts and reconstructed cost centres, providing better reporting and traceability.

There were also a number of other problems that were limiting Prodrive in its business aims, not least the fact that IFS 2003 has limited flexibility in supporting an expanding business. The growth of the company had led to five, individual businesses being established within a holding company structure. Prodrive now wanted to run these five separate businesses in a single IFS instance, introducing consistent processes across these businesses wherever appropriate.

HOW CEDAR BAY MET THE CHALLENGE

Recognised as experts in the field of providing data capture solutions for IFS Applications, Cedar Bay’s IFS Application knowledge and hands-on business experience is second to none. An expansion of the team in recent years has led Cedar Bay to successfully undertake a wide range of IFS projects, from the implementation of new IFS components, through to full re-implementations and upgrades.

This operational expertise was exactly what Prodrive required as the project evolved. In adapting to the upgraded software, the management team adopted a positive approach, fully-recognising the need to alter the way that the company operated internally, using the standard ‘best practice’ approach that IFS Apps 9 offers. The Cedar Bay consultancy team utilised its functional and technical skills and expertise to complete the move from IFS 2003 to IFS Applications 9, carefully documenting the current processes, designing the new solution and completing full implementation.

Although the project was treated as a re-implementation, Cedar Bay also provided all of the technical resources to migrate data from the existing IFS installation to the Apps 9 environment. This was a complex task and required many iterations due to the way that IFS has changed how it handles some data in the different versions.

THE RESULTS

Prodrive has now been live with IFS Apps 9 for several months, reaping huge benefits from the success of the re-implementation in areas of project engineering, finance, supply chain and manufacturing. Having now implemented a substantial cross-section of the IFS functionality, the company is currently preparing to embark on Phase II of the project, giving it the opportunity to turn on additional features that are available in Apps 9.

Prodrive now has a future-proofed IFS solution without any customisations. This platform will support the company’s forecasted business growth across the next 3-5 years, providing all the functionality needed.

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