An independent panel of judges visited the candidates to assess each application and the winners were announced at the conference.

Congratulations to Case Bases Ltd, a manufacturer of custom cash drawers and modular, fabricated tills which they supply to customers all over the world, as they were announced the winner.

Their application which won this prestigious competition against many other excellent entries included the EFACS ERP system, an intermediate application called AXON from SFJ Systems, and Preactor 400 APS.

It had provided Cash Bases with an impressive return on their investment of over 700%.

Paul Lambert described the project in great detail, highlighting things that went very right and others that they would have done differently with the benefit of hindsight.  Their total investment in the project was less than £80,000 including software and services but the measurable financial benefits so far had exceeded £580K.   These benefits came from:-

• increased output (up from 2,413 units in 2004 to 2,520 units in 2006);
• reduced WIP (saving of £150K);
• increased efficiency of bottleneck resources allowing existing capacity to be used more effectively;
• overdue days from 19.8 in 2004 to zero, on-time deliveries increased from 34% to 94%.

In addition there were non-quantifiable benefits such as increased visibility of the order book and identification of sub-contract needs and of course a huge improvement in customr satisfaction due to on-time deliveries.