KeyMed

The Head of Information Systems at KeyMed Ltd, Richard Cherry, shares experiences from being right in the middle of a business application implementation project.

Company Overview

"KeyMed (Medical & Industrial Equipment) Ltd was established in 1971, built around the new Olympus medical endoscopy range and later, the manufacture and application of this technology for industrial applications. The partnership with Olympus was increasingly strong and in 1987, KeyMed became a wholly owned subsidiary of Olympus Optical Co., Japan. Managed and sustained growth means that KeyMed now has over 1000 employees in the UK, Ireland and America.

KeyMed's approach to systems

KeyMed is unusual for lots of reasons, some would say eccentric, and one of them is certainly its approach to Information Technology. This area of the business is driven by a partnership of IT professionals and senior business managers, which collectively agree the company's Business Systems direction, planning and project workload. I believe that this business-led approach is one of the key factors for the successful introduction of new technologies and computing systems at KeyMed in the past and our current project to implement IFS.

KeyMed has been operating a traditional green-on-black ERP II legacy system for over ten years, which had supported the company well. However, the continual growth of the company, introduction of new business models and the increasing demands from the customers in this dynamic business environment, all combined to highlight the limitations of the current business system. A project was therefore created to review the marketplace for a single solution, to support all the areas of the business, provide a foundation for future growth and facilitate KeyMed's underlying ethos of 'measure, challenge and improve'.

Provider of surgical endoscopy and related products.

IFS at KeyMed

The selection of IFS (the organisation) and IFS Applications 2003 was based on many factors, not least of which was the extremely useful and successful week-long detailed reviewed of the system undertaken by nearly thirty KeyMed staff at IFS' offices at High Wycombe. While we had to ensure all the functionality and support for the business that our current system provides would still be available, the team identified several key enhancements that IFS Applications would offer, such as:

Built-in business procedures & process flow
Workflow automation with digital signatures
Direct access to 'business information'
Consistent subsidiary management
Improved user access to information

Like most companies of our size, KeyMed has already completed business process reviews and the company was considered to be quite 'lean' which made the project team reluctant to set high expectations for improvements from the implementation of IFS. It was therefore proposed that the 'Real Time Enterprise' or RTE model would be used to drive our review of internal processes to remove 'lag' and the integrated workflow, business intelligence, event server and collaborative portals would be wholeheartedly embraced throughout all areas of the business to achieve noticeable improvements in the company's overall effectiveness.

We are now four months into our ten month project and despite the incredibly difficult task of learning a new system while still supporting a busy and demanding business environment, the team remain enthusiastic and motivated towards our implementation later this year."

Richard Cherry, Head of Information Systems, KeyMed Ltd

"The team remain enthusiastic and motivated towards our implementation later this year."

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