Informit Systems

Company:

Introduction

BUE Marine is a ship owner and marine service group providing support to the offshore oil and gas industries.

The group was formed in 1991 and in 1993 opened its first overseas office in Baku, Azerbaijan. BUE are today considered to be the leading international marine service provider in the Caspian Sea. The company further expanded its business in 1999 with the acquisition of a large fleet of North Sea vessels.

In 1998 BUE employed consultants to research software solutions, which would meet the expanding requirements of their businesses, provide software which would service the UK and Caspian offices and provide a purchasing system which would meet the wide ranging requirements of marine procurement.

The key requirement was to be able to run the same system in the Edinburgh and the Caspian offices simultaneously. INFORMIT SYSTEMS was the only supplier that was willing to propose a solution to this aspect of the specification. At our invitation INFORMIT SYSTEMS prepared and costed a detailed specification covering all key areas of our requirements. Their proposed solution was based around the flexibility provided by the SAGE Line 100 Accounts package, supplemented by custom developments in Purchasing, Sales, Stock and Accounts. The principle areas of customisation were: 

Regional Access to the software

In 1998 the communication links with Baku would not support WAN communication and INFORMIT proposed that the time difference between the regions be used to give both offices access to the same system. The proposal was to give control of the data to one site at a time while the other would have view and reporting access only. At specified daily times all the new and changed records are exported and transferred electronically to the other site. The export process switches the software security to view only while the opposite import provides full access

Multi Company Operation

Shortly after becoming involved with INFORMIT we were required to implemented multi-company, multi-currency operations. We did not want to run more than one accounts system and we certainly did not want to duplicate Purchasing and Sales in separate data sets. INFORMIT proposed an ingenious method of running multi company accounts using a single Group Accounts set providing an automated Journal that analysed and split the Control Accounts between companies. Today we operate seventeen companies in the group using a single Purchase, Sales and Job Costing System and a single set of Accounts (Circa 4000 accounts). INFORMIT has also provided a means of maintaining individual bank balances between many separate companies while operating a single real bank account in each currency, resulting in better banking terms.

Purchase Order Processing

Our requirements for Purchase Order processing were also unconventional. The procurement department deals with tens of thousands of individual items many of which are only used once or have a frequency measured in years. Creating Stock for each item was untenable but the system required rapid retrieval of history if the same item was to be re-ordered. INFORMIT developed an integrated Requisition, Quotation, Purchase, Stock and Job Costing system based on defining items, at the time of Order, using key words. The development was supplemented with faxing from within the Quotation/Purchase Modules and had an immediate beneficial effect on the procurement operations. Donald Guthrie our purchasing manager …

In our initial discussions INFORMIT convinced us of the flexibility that using SAGE Line 100 would give us to develop a single integrated solution, which could change as our company matured. In the six years that we have been using SAGE Line 100 we have not been disappointed, INFORMIT have provided many extra facilities to augment the core Accounting System including, a common user access, invoice registers, comprehensive user security features and powerful supplementary ledger enquiries.

Mr Sinclair, Group Accountant quoted:

“On a personal level, I joined BUE Marine in 1999, and have seen constant development and improvement of the sage system. Much of the improvement gives us better control or saves significant processing time. One of the most powerful tools in the development of the system we have now is that we have got a “drill down” and reporting facility that allows analysis from our nominal ledger right down to our original purchase order, giving both accountants and non accountants an excellent management tool.”

They also specified and developed a separate personnel and crewing system for us, using the Sage 4GL.

We regularly consult with INFORMIT and receive prompt attention should any developments be required or problems occur. Informit is a Sage Solution Centre in the real sense of the words.