Safehinge Primera

Safehinge Primera offers an award-winning range of lifesaving products for the education and mental health sectors. It’s a well-established mid-sized company based in Glasgow that has benefitted from extreme growth, scaling from £6m to £12m in the last two years. When SafeHinge acquired Primera and became Safehinge Primera Ltd; the merger birthed a new, market-leading entity but created some unique business hurdles to overcome. 

The Background:

Following the acquisition of Primera, the newly formed limited company was facing a challenge. They had many different systems including Hubspot, Salesforce, Rike Project, Sage 50 etc. Everything was disconnected. There would be a solo system for CAD drawings and another for expenses. And with manufacturing located in Blackpool but a head office and purchasing in Glasgow, this fragmentation was causing them a lot of issues. After two years of internal discussion, they decided they needed everything within one system; solutions that worked together and updated in real-time. 

After finding Smart IT on the Gold partner page of the Odoo ERP website, the team engaged with Smart IT, finally selecting the Odoo partner for its demonstrable expertise following a rigorous demo and pre-sales process: 

"We were originally looking at incremental efficiency improvements to current systems and methods. But it quickly became clear that the big gains would come from migration to a business-wide single data source." 

Kevin Addie, SafeHinge Primera 

The Brief:

After years of operating with disparate systems, SafeHinge Primera required a modular approach that would allow them to swap out functions for the new ERP in parallel or as a series. If priorities changed, resources could be reallocated. The migration would start with the core accounting module to include: 

• Stock management 
• Project management 
• Reporting 
• Purchasing 

Why Smart IT?

​Smart IT was selected for its UK-based talent, local and secure hosting, and status as one of the leading gold partners worldwide for Odoo. SafeHinge Primera confident in Smart IT’s track record having completed over 100 company instance installations, including several company-wide projects for large 20M+ businesses, migrating from other ERP systems like Nav, SAP, Netsuite and Sage. 

The Solution

To meet its requirement for modulation, Smart IT conducted a GAP analysis to assign the first priorities. These were defined as accounts, stock/warehouse management, purchasing and ops.  

 

For the rollout, Smart IT created an SHP Odoo instance and began importing data from Safe, Factory Master and more systems which would later be retired. Legacy systems that were to remain were integrated with Odoo including the likes of Wrike, Hubspot and CPQ. At each stage, the modules were customised to match SafeHinge Primera’s ways of working internal teams thoroughly trained in their efficient use to ensure new system adoption.  

 

“Local hosting was a core benefit. SafeHinge found the response time and latency to be far better with Smart IT hosting. And our 20 UK-based full-time developers helped to seamlessly customise Odoo to the client’s exact requirements,” comments Nick Harvey, Smart IT. 

 

With each migration, assets were stored in a library or ‘app store’ that allowed new migrations to be developed on the shoulders of what came before. This enabled Smart IT to migrate away from systems rapidly including Harvest, People HR, and Expensify rapidly. 

 

The Results

Overall, 15 different applications were absorbed by or integrated with Odoo for a seamless user experience. The new system includes: 

• Sales 
• Purchasing 
• Inventory 
• Manufacturing 
• Accounts 
• HR 
• eCommerce 

 

“We thought there was going to be blood on the floor with the implementation of an entire new system, but the move has been seamless.” 

Kevin Addie, SafeHinge Primera 

 

This ERP implementation allowed SafeHinge Primera to switch to a proactive and scalable business model across multiple currencies and multiple entities. It improved efficiencies and reduced costs by 50% across admin tasks (estimated £75k per annum) and reduced senior leadership time on reporting by 32 hours per month at an estimated cost saving of £38k per annum.  

 

As a culture, this development has reduced the knee-jerk reaction to bolt-on future fragmented systems and there are better controls & reporting over every part of the business including: 

• Pro-active workflows and authorisations that lockdown purchases and spending. 
• Work orders include operation sheets, training videos and key quality data (serial number, key inspection data etc). 
• Live project profitability reporting. 
• Capital budget workflows and authorisations with live reporting. 
• Cash flow, as a standard, is always available to report.