Belgian ice cream boost for Marcam

Marcam, a division of Invensys, has won a major contract to supply its Protean enterprise software to a leading Belgian ice cream manufacturer, Glacio, who are focussing on the specialty market

Marcam, a division of Invensys, has won a major contract to supply its Protean enterprise software to a leading Belgian ice cream manufacturer.

The business was awarded by Beerse-based Glacio, which designs and manufactures a successful range of ice cream products.

Glacio is a newly-formed company following a management buyout from Nestle subsidiary Scholler; it employs 170 people and presents a solid basis to expand.

Today, the new owners of Glacio have resolutely chosen to fully focus on ice cream specialities for the homevending and gastronomy sales channels in Europe and Asia.

Glacio provides innovative products to its commercial partners, who concentrate their branding efforts on these very demanding market segments.

In this way, Glacio capitalises on its expertise and grasps new opportunities in growing markets.

"This operational change from high-volume standardised to low-volume customised demands a world class enterprise solution and our initial competition included all the major industry players including Axapta, Navision and SAP," explained Sanjay Razdan, President of Marcam.

"The final decision was mainly based on long-term total cost of ownership.

Global comparisons between companies running other systems and companies running Protean gave Protean the advantage," he noted.

Protean is attractive for Glacio due to its flexibility, ease of implementation and use and fit to the specific requirements of this industry.

"We are delighted to add Glacio to our growing list of customers.

This agreement validates the Marcam strategy of focusing on process companies, delivering systems that provide exceptional function and flexibility, while offering the lowest total cost of ownership", he added.

The partnership with Marcam will allow Glacio to benefit from the many years of experience Marcam has in developing systems for the food and process industries.

Another important factor in the Marcam success was its ability to document a Protean implementation in the Glacio Japanese consignment stock facility in less than two days.

"Documenting the Japanese consignment stock facility so quickly convinced us of the strength of Protean.

Because of its ease of use and flexibility demonstrated in this extremely short timeframe, we expect a fast company wide implementation in time for our January 2005 deadline," said Glacio CEO, Thomas Becker.

Protean APIs and CWOM (customisation without modification) capabilities also proved to be important in the contract success, as did operational issues including complex processes such as rework and recycling.

Another important factor is the ability to produce the correct consistency between products and labels in line with the latest EC regulations.

"Protean has a very logical construction that enables us to model our business to reality and at the same time is proving very straightforward for users.

Combine this with the dedication of the Marcam team and it is easy to see why we choose this enterprise solution to drive our business forward," concluded Glacio IT and Administration Manager Gunter Mollen.

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