Intentia ANZ inks $900K ERP deal in Europe

Stan Beer
Thursday, 03 November 2005 11:00

IT Industry - Deals

The Australian office of Swedish mid-market enterprise applications provider, Intentia, has signed a deal worth over $900,000 with Creata, a multinational provider of consumer marketing and manufacturing services, to roll out Intentia’s enterprise application suite globally.

Creata, a multinational company with offices in Australia, Europe, the Americas and Asia, designs and develops over 1,500 new consumer products, shipping nearly one billion products to more than 140 countries, with manufacturing plants in China.

Creata intends to replace its existing legacy systems to achieve the level of functionality needed to support the company’s continued expansion.

“It was very difficult to manage,” said Don Gates, the CIO of Creata. “Literally thousands of Excel spreadsheets were being generated every year to keep track of key business information. Intentia’s solution will replace much of that, and in the process give us the integration and visibility we need to effectively manage a growing business.”

Integration with business partners at the transaction level was a key requirement and the timeliness of batch-oriented transaction integration made certain business processes impossible to manage, according to Creata. The company required transaction-level integrations implemented through Web services.

Creata was also looking for a system with strong project accounting functionality that would help it better track the Australian and overseas promotions business. It also required strong distribution and warehousing functionality to support the catalog business.

Compatibility with IBM WebSphere-centric content management systems was also a key technology requirement, as was the ability to support multiple languages, including Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese, within a single instance.

“Ultimately, Intentia offered the right fit for our business. The suite is a very scalable and robust solution that, based on open standards Java, means we can be confident that our investment is secure for the future. We were also able to maintain alignment with our WebSphere investment, and underpin the new system with a reliable iSeries platform through Intentia’s strong business partnership with IBM,” Gates said.

The system will be deployed across Australia, Asia, the US and the UK. The first components are expected to go live in early 2006.