Clothing and footwear maker Pentland Brands is using grid technology to underpin an overhaul of its operational systems.

The company, which owns Berghaus, Ellesse, Kickers, Ted Baker and Speedo, manages the design, manufacture and distribution for each brand separately, but wanted to standardise processes across the business.

Rob Wilson, group infrastructure director at Pentland Brands, says the company’s need to replace disparate, ageing operational systems provided the opportunity to standardise IT systems and infrastructure.

‘Our existing sales, order and processing systems were coming to their end of life; we had very old systems for finance and warehousing,’ he said.  

‘The business objective was to bring together all the brands with the same business processes, using the best points from each of the brand’s existing systems.’

Pentland has overhauled its IT infrastructure hardware using enterprise and workgroup servers and storage from vendor Sun Microsystems’ N1 Grid range.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software supplied by SAP is being used to provide a standard operational system and single data repository for the whole organisation.

‘The Sun technology is economical, more secure and involves fewer overheads to look after from a support point of view,’ said Wilson.

The grid configuration allows Pentland to reallocate computing resources according to demand.

‘The biggest fixed IT cost is the depreciation of kit. With grid, I don’t need to buy as much kit because I know spare processing capacity can be used across the business,’ said Wilson.

The benefits of using the Sun hardware to run SAP software include the sharing of consistent processes, and being able to look across the business to assess performance more accurately and plan strategy based on the business decisions.

‘With SAP we are achieving better efficiencies. The knock-on benefit to the business is that we get all the brands to talk to each other,’ said Wilson.

‘We can share best practice, drive better deals by buying in bulk and, if time is money, we can get more products to market more quickly.’