Background

Topcon Great Britain is a subsidiary of one of the world’s leading manufacturers and distributors of precision instruments for the optical and surveying industries. The firm, founded in Japan, supplies products that are widely used in a number of applications including surveying, GPS, construction and machine control as well as in medicine, ophthalmics and optometry

Business Need

Topcon’s previous financial system presented “constant issues with reliability,” says IT Director Roger Cherowbrier. “We needed a completely reliable, integrated system that offered advanced levels of analysis.”

Solution

Four years ago Topcon decided to implement HansaWorld Enterprise for 60 users at its Newbury head office and regional offices throughout the UK. Head of Finance Malcolm Cowling said at the time that

“of all the products we looked at, HansaWorld was the only application immediately available that could deliver the level of integration we were looking for within a single underlying database and application language. Combined with its low cost of ownership, this gave the product a clear advantage over its competitors.”

The company’s user base has now grown to 100, with areas of functionality covering accounts, logistics and stock control, purchase orders, quotations, repetitive invoicing, servicing, rental, fixed assets, expenses, CRM, graphical scheduling, intranet, and faxing.

Results

“The year after we installed HansaWorld we moved from making significant losses into profit,” says Roger Cherowbrier. “We put this down to the efficiencies of the software and the resulting headcount reductions.” “It was HansaWorld’s integrated approach that attracted us to the software in the first place and they always seem to be ahead of the pack with functionality,” adds Roger Cherowbrier. “They were the first to have integrated Customer Relationship Management, still one of the few to have implemented document management properly, and the additional cloud services such as postcode addressing and SMSs are a real innovation. It has always been critical that HansaWorld could work simply, in realtime, for our four UK branches, and we are now considering giving access to our mobile salesforce as well.

“Everything works in a truly integrated manner: stock that we buy can be automatically created as assets if we choose to add them to the rental fleet, and then automatically depreciated; invoices for equipment can create maintenance contracts; communications with our customers are automatically connected with them.

"We are also very impressed with the different levels of analysis offered by HansaWorld – we can assess the turnover and profitability of everything we do, from individual product lines to marketing campaigns, regions and sales groups. This level of analysis is perfect for advanced business intelligence, which is the next project we are thinking about with HansaWorld.”