Ceandess Survives an Arson Attack

Ceandess is a manufacturer of a wide range of metal fittings used in the auto industry. Roots of the business go back more than a 100 years. They are located in Wolverhampton in the UK.

Their complex legacy Client/Server ERP system had fallen behind on upgrades and was not staying up with their business requirements. The cost of upgrading it was going to be at least as much as installing a new system. After extensive evaluation of the products on the market they chose Manu Online together with Sage One for financials.

They started to plan their migration to the new system when disaster struck. A break-in to their offices resulted in an arson attack. The fire brigade was on site in minutes and the fire was extinguished. However in that short time smoke had destroyed all the IT equipment in their office, including their legacy server.

The decision was made to accelerate the Manu Online project rather than to try to recover the old server. Just days before the fire, the basic product and customer data had been taken from the old system for trial in Manu Online. The order book was hand written in from copies of emails from customers. The implementation timetable for the basic business processes was squeezed down from several weeks to just 4 days.

Matt Davies, Manager of Ceandess, had first hand experience of benefits of cloud computing. The new system was immediately available – of course there was not even the need to wait for the delivery of new hardware.