“By moving SYSPRO to the cloud and enabling ease of access, we have seen cost savings in areas such as greatly reduced downtime and lower IT maintenance and consulting costs.”
– Virginia Hughes – Financial Manager, Gold Reef Speciality Chemicals
Customer Profile
Gold Reef Speciality Chemicals has been manufacturing adhesives for carpets and textiles for more than 40 years. Based in Durban, South Africa, the company has expanded its product range to cater for the diverse spread of industries in which it is active today.
The Business Challenge
Outdated infrastructure was leading to unacceptable levels of downtime as well as an inability to meet management’s need for accurate, real-time data.
The Solution
Gold Reef Speciality Chemicals decided to move its fully integrated SYSPRO solution to the cloud. A long-term SYSPRO customer, Gold Reef uses all the Financial modules in the solution as well as the MRP module.
The Outcome
Gold Reef Speciality Chemicals moved its entire IT infrastructure, including its fully integrated SYSPRO ERP solution, to the cloud. The result was significantly less downtime, freer access to data and systems as well as cost savings on IT maintenance and consulting fees.
Virginia Hughes, Financial Manager of Gold Reef Speciality Chemicals, says the decision to move from on premise to the cloud was based on a need to move away from its outdated infrastructure while simultaneously providing the company’s executives with one central point from which to access accurate, real-time data.
“SYSPRO is the preferred solution for Gold Reef,” she says. Our footprint spans Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, and a high percentage of our staff work remotely, so we need to be able to communicate effortlessly and efficiently. This way our staff can log in, view data, check on items and update records regardless of where they are.”
Driving better business results
Gold Reef is using SYSPRO’s Actionable Insights capability to drive better business results. This is made possible by optimizing the value of business-critical insights and quick analysis.
“Our SYSPRO consultant helps us design reports which meet our specific needs,” Hughes says. “Our use of the customizable reporting goes beyond financial reports to quick analysis of aspects such as geographical regions of sales and the product quantities going into each region.”
“By moving SYSPRO to the cloud and enabling ease of access, we have seen cost savings in areas such as greatly reduced downtime
and lower IT maintenance and consulting costs. Consultants no longer need to come on site to fix errors, they can dial in directly from wherever they are.”
The improvement in downtime has also reduced the risk of files being corrupted by events such as power outages. With WiFi access, staff don’t lose any time during power failures as they are able to use their laptops to log on straight to the cloud.
With the SYSPRO solution, Gold Reef benefits from smooth day-to-day operations. The system performs automatic updates on each module and, because it’s fully integrated, there’s less manual intervention and therefore fewer human errors.
Reaping the benefits of the cloud
Migrating its infrastructure to the cloud has given Gold Reef a host of tangible benefits, including easy upgrades, automatic updates, lower cost of ownership, offsite data storage, productivity anywhere and the elimination of IT maintenance costs.
“We have the ability to stake our requirements to what we need, rather than what we think we may need in two years’ time,” Virginia says. “We can scale up and down at any time, which has been particularly useful during the pandemic.”
Further benefits include: easier, quicker and more secure backups; the ability to communicate and share documents more easily; better collaboration internally and externally; data security; and the ability to free up office space as there’s no need for a large IT room.
“The cloud set-up is not complicated. We literally moved our system from an onsite server to a server in the cloud. Our SYSPRO consultant and an IT consultant performed a complete backup of the system and put the SQL server into the cloud. We continued to work with no downtime and, once we switched over and made sure everything was working 100% on the cloud, downtime became a thing of the past,” Virginia says.
