Kingspan Water & Energy is the leader in high-performance insulation and building envelopes.
Business goals
With headquarters in Portadown, Northern Ireland, UK, is part of the Kingspan Group. Kingspan today is a €4.4bn revenue group with five main business streams across 129 manufacturing sites in over 70 countries. As part of the group’s mission to accelerate a net zero emissions future with the wellbeing of people and planet at its heart, the Water & Energy division offers a growing portfolio of innovative rainwater harvesting and flooding control systems, as well as solutions for environmental fuel storage, hot water and smart building monitoring.
Business goals
At Kingspan Water & Energy, the ERP infrastructure, including two legacy systems and a separate services application, did not reflect current business practices and lacked functionality to meet their current requirements and future challenges. This included multi-company functionality and intercompany trading processes. A new strategic ERP platform was required to support Kingspan’s ambitious strategy. After careful reflection and consultation, Kingspan Water & Energy decided it required a single instance, multi-site, multi-company, and multi-currency ERP system that could cover over 90% of all business processes. Infor LN ERP was selected as the best option for Kingspan Water & Energy. A strong point of Infor LN ERP is the Core Model approach, comprising a single, scalable ERP LN model along with peripheral applications.
Preferred partner: Merino Consulting Services
Merino Consulting Services was selected as the implementation partner because of their Infor LN expertise and implementation track record. In addition, Kingspan valued Merino’s flexible approach and their cultural fit with the Kingspan organization. Adopting the definition of a Kingspan enterprise Core Model, a successful go live was achieved for the rollout over Kingspan’s twelve UK sites in early 2020.
Richard Mayrs, Head of IT, Kingspan Water & Energy: “One of the biggest challenges was data migration from our legacy ERP systems to the Infor LN ERP system. The first problem was generating readable data formats for the migration. Therefore, data conversion was one of the special items in the training provided by Merino.
Barry John Keeley: “After considering several options we selected Merino Consulting Services as the implementation partner because they offered the best commercial agreement in terms of project structure and budget for such a long-lasting and complex project. In addition, we valued the unique items Merino included in its implementation offering, such as improved practices and templates.”
Richard Mayrs: “There was a good cultural fit between Kingspan Water & Energy and the Merino consultants regarding professionalism, work ethic and integrity. They are flexible in their approach, which is paramount in the long process of an ERP implementation in which you inevitably have to solve problems underway. In the first stage of the project we had a close collaboration at our headquarters to detail the project plan and get to know each other well. After that we developed a successful partnership with a way of working based on online communication and incidental face-to-face meetings.”
