NOONAN looks to the future with Agresso ERP

UNIT 4 Business Software Limited, the Irish subsidiary of UNIT4, the global leader in software that supports business change, has announced that it has secured a contract worth around €1m with Ireland's market leading Facility Management company NOONAN. The Group has become the latest organisation to select UNIT4's Agresso ERP suite of finance and business software, which will be rolled out to all 7,000 employees as it looks to consolidate and streamline core finance and business processes using Agresso.

The past five years have seen NOONAN embark on significant growth, expansion and repositioning into a multi-service facilities management organisation. Today it provides a comprehensive range of services from technical, energy, environmental and project management to security, cleaning and ground work services to public sector and commercial organisations across Ireland and the UK. Declan Doyle, Chief Financial Officer for NOONAN, commented: "We have ambitious growth plans and were finding that our previous disparate systems and processes were just not up to the task. We'd had the system for 10 years and with growing employee and customer numbers were spending an increasing amount of time collating, exporting and importing business and finance data between different solutions, which is both inefficient and error prone. Our ability to report in a timely manner to stakeholders as well as meeting customer demands was suffering as a result. So the logical step for us was to look for an alternative. After an extensive evaluation process of a number of major market vendors, we found the solution platform we needed in Agresso."

NOONAN undertook an extensive evaluation of solutions on offer in the market, looking at SAP, Oracle and Microsoft before finally selecting UNIT4 Agresso. Declan explains: "On meeting with UNIT4 we were impressed immediately with the Group's focus on services organisations as well as the team's market knowledge and understanding of our business and the facilities management sector in general. The Agresso solution itself offers us the breadth and depth of functionality we need to streamline and consolidate our business and financial processes and gives us that all important single version of the truth, at a glance and from within one system. So Agresso was the hands down winner."

NOONAN has worked closely with UNIT4 to scope the project carefully and is confident that all of its informational needs are being met with Agresso. The team has embarked on a phased roll out of Agresso and is planning to go live with the first phase in July 2014.

Declan concluded: "For the first time we have a solution that puts our people at its heart. It is easy to use and all of the Noonan team is committed to the change so we are confident that in using Agresso across our business, we will be able to work together more closely using data that we know to be reliable, accurate and up to date. With Agresso I believe we will save money and time when it comes to administration and data processing, make more informed decisions based on real-time information and improve our cash flow, customer knowledge and management and operational performance; all of which enable us to build on our competitive advantage and give us the right platform to facilitate further growth. In addition, Agresso's flexible architecture allows us to make system changes as we need to, which will prove important as we continue to grow our business. Had we not had a solution of the calibre of Agresso I believe we risked losing business and competitive edge in the long term, so it's a game changer for us."