Reed New Zealand goes live with IBS Bookmaster
REED New Zealand, a division of the Reed Elsevier Group and one of New Zealand's largest publishing companies, went live with IBS Bookmaster on May 29, 2006.
"Prior to implementing IBS Bookmaster, Reed New Zealand had an out-of-date legacy system that had a series of work around solutions and which could not be fully supported in the future," explained David O'Brien, Managing Director of Harcourt Education Australia and Reed New Zealand.
"We needed to implement an ERP system in both Australia and New Zealand that would allow us to harmonise procedures and the way things are done across the two divisions.
"IBS Bookmaster was chosen as the preferred solution because it is a good system and is the industry standard."
Reed New Zealand and Harcourt Australia are both separate divisions, servicing different markets and different customers, and each will run on a separate database of IBS Bookmaster.
Although the two divisions operate independently of each other the benefit David sees of having both on the same ERP system is that they will be able to standardise things such as reporting and financials.
"Although they are two separate companies, both Reed New Zealand and Harcourt report together to Reed Elsevier," said Mr O'Brien.
"Having one system not only makes the reporting simpler, there is also an opportunity to cross utilise staff from the two divisions. If an 'end of month' needs to be run and we are short-staffed in New Zealand we can easily get someone to assist from Australia and vice versa."
Reed New Zealand has just completed phase one of their implementation, which included implementing the base package. The early efficiencies gained from having an integrated system have been a saving in processing time and improved accuracy.
Phase two will see Reed New Zealand implement the Royalties, Editorial and Book Production and Business Intelligence modules.
"I expect that the Business Intelligence module will be very beneficial in terms of analysis and having the ability to mine and display data in different formats," said Mr O'Brien.
"The Editorial and Book Production modules will allow us to compare investments in producing titles on a standard basis across the two companies."
"The biggest benefit to us from implementing IBS Bookmaster is that we will be able to harmonise procedures and have a consistent chart of accounts for both companies.
"In terms of analysis and reports, where before we were comparing data from two different systems, we will now have a single, consistent approach to account classification, reporting and thus analysis,” added Mr O’Brien.
1-Aug-2006