Fagerhult Chooses to Roll Out Jeeves in Multiple Countries

STOCKHOLM, March 3, 2015—Jeeves Information Systems AB (Jeeves), a provider of ERP software solutions for small to midmarket manufacturing and distribution companies worldwide, today announced that its customer Fagerhult, one of the Europe’s leading lighting companies, has chosen to expand its use of the Jeeves ERP solution, rolling the system out in multiple companies across several countries.

Fagerhult chose the Jeeves ERP solution five years ago in order to better manage logistics processes at two production units in Sweden. Low cost of ownership, flexibility and ease of upgrades were three important factors that lead to the company’s initial selection. These benefits played an important role in Fagerhult’s decision to consolidate the use of multiple systems, implementing Jeeves ERP as the standard system for sales and production companies across Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Holland, France and China.

Through acquisitions and organic growth, Fagerhult has dominated the European market and plans for continued growth as the company transitions into a global player in the lighting market. Fagerhult has subsidiaries in 20 countries and, together with representatives and distributors, reaches 40 markets around the world.

Jeeves ERP Replaces Microsoft Dynamics AX, Visma and Scala

Fagerhult’s initiative to invest fully in Jeeves ERP will result in a more holistic view of operations. Prior to the decision, the company was using Microsoft Dynamics AX for sales automation in a number of companies, Visma within the retail business unit, and Scala at the production unit in China.

“We want to simplify and redraw the system stack; many integrations have emerged over the years,” said Michael Atkins, team manager of the business system and architecture group at Fagerhult. “One of the most important objectives of this project is to make it easier for our employees to follow workflows in all parts of our business. Today, it is difficult because different systems manage different processes, and there are breakpoints between the systems.”

Fagerhult Prioritizes Low Total Cost of ERP System Ownership

Fagerhult’s system consolidation initiative was launched after a planned system upgrade of the sales companies. As the project progressed, it became clear that it would be significantly larger and more complex than expected. “Instead of doing a major upgrade in one of our systems, we decided to initiate a more future-oriented assessment of our entire system environment,” said Anders Jakobsson, group IT manager at Fagerhult. “In a preliminary study, we analyzed the current situation and our goals for the future. The picture that emerged was that there was much to gain from a system consolidation. We chose Jeeves ERP to be our system of record for most of our businesses because of its low total cost of ownership, as well as because of our internal competence with the system. We also value our partnership with Jeeves and its team. We needed a full-service supplier to ensure that adaptations and upgrades would run smoothly in the future.”

The implementation of Jeeves ERP will start with the production unit in China and retail operations in Bollebygd. The implementation will continue with several sales companies in 2015, with the remainder being added in 2016. In total, Jeeves ERP will support more than 600 users within Fagerhult.

Daniel Göhlin, general manager for Jeeves, stressed that cooperation and collaboration with Fagerhult will extremely important throughout the span of the project. “We’re so thrilled that Fagerhult has made the decision to implement Jeeves ERP as its backbone across several companies and countries. For us, this decision confirms the strength of Jeeves ERP when it comes to providing support for global growth and effective multi-company management across many geographic markets. The decision also validates Jeeves ERP’s low total cost of ownership. This benefit is central to the system’s design, crucial for Fagerhult, and strategically important to us as we work with our customers to build long-term partnerships as their total solution provider.”