Steatite designs, manufactures, and provides extremely dependable know-how to be used in harsh situations, the place failure just isn’t an choice. Working in each the US and the UK, Steatite caters to a variety of consumers, from SMEs and authorities organisations to giant multinationals.
The issue:
The corporate’s legacy system, a extremely customised on-premises ERP, was changing into more and more sophisticated based on Jonathan Jackson, Operations Director at Steatite. The system had advanced by numerous iterations from Vantage to Epicor, and the quantity of customized code made updates troublesome and useful resource intensive.
The answer:
By transferring to the cloud, Steatite sought to resolve its operational challenges whereas unlocking entry to modern options obtainable solely by the cloud-based model of Epicor Kinetic. “Epicor’s growth path was a consideration level for us,” Jackson says. “Remaining on-premises risked obsolescence, whereas transferring to the cloud made positive we stayed with the newest and most safe product.”
Moreover, Steatite’s progress required a sturdy and scalable answer. With extra enterprise items positioned in numerous websites, a few of which lacked technical capabilities, the cloud provided dependable entry from a number of areas.”We wanted scalable, versatile, resilient entry for a number of events, all with various ranges of connectivity and inhouse experience”. The cloud-based answer addressed all these necessities, streamlining the onboarding of recent websites and customers and eliminating the complexities that had as soon as hindered growth efforts.
The transfer to the cloud was designed to ease the load on Steatite’s IT workforce. With a rising workers base, managing updates, backups, and licensing was consuming assets that will have been higher used for strategic initiatives. By consolidating these processes within the cloud, Steatite aimed to free its IT workforce to prioritise innovation and long-term enhancements, shifting focus from routine upkeep to enhancing operations.
The challenges:
However it wasn’t totally plain crusing. To modify from a extremely customised on-premises system to a cloud-based ERP, Steatite wanted to streamline its present system to a “vanilla model” that will work with the brand new cloud-based SQL database. It was essential to fastidiously resolve which core capabilities to maintain when stripping down the product.
On high of that, creating new interface components was one other problem. “We needed to develop new types, stories, and dashboards from scratch, utilizing totally different toolsets and environments,” Jackson explains.
Migrating to the cloud meant embracing utterly new instruments and environments, demanding important time and specialised information. To navigate this, Epicor assigned a devoted undertaking supervisor to collaborate with Steatite’s inside workforce and supply steady assist throughout the migration course of. This collaboration ensured that each one operational necessities have been met by the transfer, giving precedence to obligatory options and decreasing downtime.
The migration was phased over six months, with cautious planning and implementation for testing, piloting, coaching, and rollout. “This structured strategy eased the transition and ensured staff have been ready to make use of the brand new system successfully,” Jackson stories.
The end result:
Steatite has benefited significantly from the transfer to the cloud, which in the end remodeled its enterprise and IT operations.
“The best profit is the discount in burden on our IT workforce to handle backups and restoration. We now not must spend time on patches and redevelopment as that is taken care of centrally,” Jackson shares. This permits IT to deal with progress initiatives fairly than routine upkeep.
Scalability has additionally improved, streamlining onboarding and facilitating growth. “We all know that the system is versatile sufficient to accommodate extra necessities from new websites or workers, no matter location or obtainable bandwidth, making onboarding fast and simple,” Jackson notes. “Having day-to-day performance positioned within the cloud and centrally managed works extraordinarily effectively for a enterprise resembling ours, which is comprised of very totally different enterprise items with distinctive necessities working globally.”
One other important development has been safety. Multi-factor authentication and different safety applied sciences are built-in into the cloud system, guaranteeing adherence to business requirements like ISO and CEP. In accordance with Jackson, Steatite has “reached the identical degree of safety within the cloud as we’d anticipate from an on-premises platform.”
AI-driven predictive upkeep has additionally been made doable by way of cloud integration. This characteristic permits the enterprise to increase asset lifecycles, cut back downtime, and proactively handle tools—all of that are important for preserving dependability in harsh situations.
A future-ready platform
With Epicor’s ongoing assist and a sturdy cloud infrastructure, Steatite is now well- positioned for long-term progress and innovation. The organisation has decreased IT overhead, enhanced safety, and elevated operational effectivity by switching to a simplified, scalable cloud answer. The enterprise has established a stable foundation for its future by welcoming change and addressing obstacles head-on whereas remaining each ingenious and aggressive.
When requested in the event that they’d take into account returning to an on-premises system, Jackson’s response is unequivocal: “No thanks!”
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