Whitworths: Minimised the need for manual intervention by ensuring data integrity and accuracy.

About Whitworths

Based in Irthlingborough, Northamptonshire, Whitworths is the UK’s leading supplier of branded and private-label whole foods including dried fruit, nuts and seeds. For over 125 years the company has been providing the best quality products from around the world to their consumers. The company is the top supplier in the UK’s healthy snacking and home baking markets, benefiting from a portfolio of strong brands including Sunny and Whitworths.

“From a strategic perspective, we are looking at our business as a whole to see how we can develop our ERP system to help us to work smarter and drive improvements. During our initial discussions with Cooper Software, it was evident the team had a thorough understanding of the needs of our business and how these could best be met. The solutions they have proposed will certainly have a major impact and play a significant role in driving our business forward.”
Director of Process Improvement at Whitworths

Project Background

Whitworths were replacing their legacy ERP solution with IFS. Having recently renewed an agreement with existing
supplier, CEVA, to provide warehousing and distribution services, the new IFS solution was required to share data
with this solution. Modifications had been made to Whitworths’ legacy ERP system to ensure data
sharing could be achieved.

To ensure a successful implementation of the new ERP system, it was imperative that the IFS solution could
exchange data to and from the CEVA system. Furthermore, the solution had to offer the system administrators the
ability to create and amend the data interfaces in operation and review messages exchanged between systems.
This was to ensure that errors could be reviewed in order to minimise any impact on the business.

The new IFS solution will be used to manage Whitworths’ manufacturing processes including Procurement, Quality
Management, Inventory Tracking and Control, Sales and Manufacturing. CEVA provide finished goods warehouse,
order fulfilment and distribution operations to on-site at Whitworths’ Irthlingborough site as well as at other sites
within the CEVA estate.

Our Solution

To ensure the successful implementation of IFS, Cooper Software developed a data integration solution that was
hosted on premise, with a web based user interface which was delivered through IFS to improve the user
experience and leverage the investment in IFS.

The solution provided a single point of reference for viewing, monitoring and amending specific data exchanges.
The functionality provided by the solution ensured that business critical data was seamlessly shared between external partners, ensuring that day to day manufacturing, warehousing and order fulfilment operations could run smoothly.

As part of the project engagement, Cooper Software also provided Whitworths with an expert ERP consultant who
was assigned to the project as Project Manager, providing the resources, knowledge and expertise required to help Whitworths’ end-users solve any ERP related problems, assist with the systems design and to deal with day to day tasks which arose during the implementation.

Benefits

The IFS implementation project and associated data integration solution, developed by Cooper Software, delivered a number of significant business benefits to Whitworths:

• The creation of a robust data integration solution to automate the sharing of data between external enterprise
business systems.
• The ability to share data with external partners over FTP.
• Provided full visibility of data exchange to system administrators.
• Minimised the need for manual intervention by ensuring data integrity and accuracy.
• Ensured the solution could be scaled to other external partners and communication mechanisms e.g. XML web
services.