Casestudy Peaty Mills

For over 40 years, Peaty Mills has been importing products from all over the world and supporting its customers in the areas of logistics, customs and store management. Until 2019, Peaty Mills used two systems to support its business processes, an accounting system and a logistics and transport system developed in Microsoft Access. Due to the growth of the company and the ageing of the current systems, the need arose for a complete ERP system.

It was agreed that the implementation would largely take place via Microsoft Teams. A consultant from HB Software would fly to the Peaty Mills head office in West Malling - Kent once every one to two months for on-site training and implementation work. The plan was to go live before the summer of 2020, but the corona pandemic threw a spanner in the works.

During the first lockdown in March 2020, Peaty Mills decided to suspend the project. Because her employees could only work from home at that time, Peaty Mills did not feel comfortable enough to continue the project. After the summer of 2020, the project was picked up again. In the meantime, completely via Microsoft Teams, since traveling to the UK was no longer an option.

During the second lockdown period at the end of 2020, the project was also delayed, but Peaty Mills dared to continue the journey online. At the beginning of 2021, Brexit caused another hitch. Peaty Mills had to deal with so much extra paperwork to get their products in and out of the UK that a go-live in January 2021 would not have been responsible. The uncertainty surrounding the border area with Ireland, where one of Peaty Mills' largest customers happens to be located, also did not help. Because quite some time had passed since the start of the project and technology had not stood still, it was decided to upgrade Business Central to version 17 before they went live, which allowed Peaty Mills to use new functionality in both Business Central and HB SmartTrade.

Finally, mid-March 2021 was the moment when Peaty Mills went live, completely remotely via Microsoft Teams guided by HB Software. Since then, the use of SmartTrade has been further developed and Peaty Mills has also made the switch to SaaS. This was technically quite a challenge, because the solution that Peaty Mills uses for EDI had no other option than to process files from a local server. In the end, we solved this with Powershell scripts. In the meantime, we can say that Business Central and SmartTrade form the heart of the current business operations.