Safehinge Primera

Safehinge Primera offers an award-winning range of lifesaving products for the education and mental health sectors. It’s a well-established mid-sized company based in Glasgow that has experienced significant growth, scaling from £6m to £12m in the last two years.  When Safehinge acquired Primera to form Safehinge Primera Ltd, the merger created a market-leading entity but also brought unique business challenges.

The Background:

Following the acquisition of Primera, the newly formed limited company faced a challenge. They had many different systems, including Hubspot, Salesforce, Wrike, Sage 50, etc. Everything was disconnected. There would be a solo system for CAD drawings and another for expenses. And with manufacturing located in Blackpool but a head office and purchasing in Glasgow, this fragmentation was causing them many issues. After two years of internal discussion, they decided they needed everything within one system: solutions that worked together and were updated in real time.

After finding Smart IT on the Gold partner page of the Odoo ERP website, the team engaged with Smart IT, finally selecting the Odoo partner for its demonstrable expertise following a rigorous demo and pre-sales process:

"We were originally looking at incremental efficiency improvements to current systems and methods. But it quickly became clear that the big gains would come from migration to a business-wide single data source."

Kevin Addie, Safehinge Primera 

The Brief:

After years of operating with disparate systems, Safehinge Primera required a modular approach, allowing them to swap out functions for the new ERP in parallel or as a series. If priorities changed, resources could be reallocated. The migration would start with the core accounting module to include:

  • Stock management 
  • Project management 
  • Reporting 
  • Purchasing 

But scale/flex with the demands of the business.

Why Smart IT?

Smart IT was selected for its UK-based talent, local and secure hosting, and status as one of the leading gold partners worldwide for Odoo. Safehinge Primera is confident in Smart IT’s track record, having completed over 100 company instance installations, including several company-wide projects for large 20M+ businesses migrating from other ERP systems like Nav, SAP, Netsuite, and Sage.

 

The Solution

To meet its requirement for modulation, Smart IT conducted a GAP analysis to assign the first priorities, which were defined as accounts, stock/warehouse management, purchasing, and operations.

For the rollout, Smart IT created an SHP Odoo instance and began importing data from Sage, Factory Master, and other systems that would later be retired. Legacy systems that were to remain were integrated with Odoo, including Wrike, Hubspot, and CPQ. At each stage, the modules were customised to match Safehinge Primera’s ways of working, and internal teams were thoroughly trained in their efficient use to ensure new system adoption.

“Local hosting was a core benefit. Safehinge found the response time and latency far better with Smart IT hosting. And our 20 UK-based full-time developers helped to customise Odoo to the client’s exact requirements seamlessly,”  comments Nick Harvey, Smart IT. 

With each migration, assets were stored in a library or ‘app store’ that allowed new migrations to be developed on top of what came before. This enabled Safehinge Primera to migrate away from systems, including Harvest, People HR, and Expensify, rapidly.


The Results

Overall, 15 different applications were absorbed by or integrated with Odoo for a seamless user experience. The new system includes:

  • Sales 
  • Purchasing 
  • Inventory 
  • Manufacturing 
  • Accounts 
  • HR 

"Having implemented several ERP solutions over three decades, all with major complications, I was extremely impressed how seamless the transition was, we had no system downtime during the initial launch phase."

Kevin Addie, Safehinge Primera 

This ERP implementation allowed Safehinge Primera to switch to a proactive and scalable business model across multiple currencies and entities. It improved efficiencies and reduced costs by 50% across admin tasks (estimated £75k per annum). It reduced senior leadership time on reporting by 32 hours per month at an estimated cost saving of £38k annually.

As for culture, this development has moved the business away from reactive, fragmented system add-ons, fostering stronger controls and improved reporting across all areas, including:

  • Proactive workflows and authorisations that lock down purchases and spending
  • Live project profitability reporting
  • Capital budget workflows and authorisations with live reporting
  • Cash flow visibility, as a standard, is always available to report
  • A fully barcode and FIFO-controlled warehouse, eliminating manual stock errors, improving stock accuracy, and optimising order fulfillment times.

Key Benefits

  • Absorption of 15 fragmented applications into Odoo ERP 
  • Dashboards and KPIs customised for each user + key partner access via manufacturing visibility portal 
  • Future expansions are possible with a new app library allowing for more integrations and functionality like PDM, PLM, Intranet, e-shop etc 
  • At least £113k in cost savings per annum  
  • Huge efficiency and quality of life improvements for the Safehinge Primera team