Happy customers endorse PROACTIS with major roll-out projects

11 August 2008

With customers’ business cases built on the back of grand promises such as reducing corporate expenditure, bringing costs under control or making staff accountable for what they spend, Proactis Group has some important promises to live up to.

So to evaluate how we deliver against these promises; look no further than the spate of major customer expansion programmes we are currently supporting. Established users of the PROACTIS Spend Control platform have extended their commitment to our technology in order to support new subsidiaries, sister companies and wider business processes.

Proactis Group CEO, Rod Jones: “It is a fact that unhappy customers do not come back for more. So to have these major customers reaffirm their faith in PROACTIS with such significant new investment, in an eProcurement market where so many software companies are accused of not delivering return on investment for customers, is the greatest endorsement we could wish for.”

Current PROACTIS roll-out projects include:

When PremierFirst Car Rental, the UK operator of the National, Alamo and Guy Salmon car rental networks, was acquired by Europcar in 2007 it was widely expected that Europcar’s established Oracle ERP system would be deployed to manage key business processes across the newly consolidated group. However the company’s owners were so impressed with the impact Premierfirst had made on its purchase-to-pay and accounts payable processes, it took the unusual decision to deploy PROACTIS P2P to manage group-wide spend. As a result, Europcar UK is now implementing our products with Europcar in France and Spain keenly monitoring the project’s progress.

H Bauer, the German-based publisher of consumer magazine titles such as TV Quick, Take a Break and Bella, has been operating the current version of its PROACTIS platform, alongside its Coda financial accounting system, since 2001. In 2007 the company surprised the publishing world with the acquisition of the consumer magazine and radio divisions of EMAP (FHM, Grazia, Heat Kerrang and Kiss FM), creating a new force in consumer media across Europe. PROACTIS P2P was selected as the cornerstone of the new group’s spend management strategy. The PROACTIS P2P system will be extended across Bauer’s new divisions during the second half of 2008 with go-live planned for early 2009.

The University of Birmingham, a long-standing user of the PROACTIS P2P solution for controlling expenditure and managing budgets, has purchased a site licence of PROACTIS PurchasePoint. The system will be used by the University of Birmingham to integrate PROACTIS P2P with its other eProcurement applications (for Contract Management, eSourcing and SRM), offering users a single intuitive entry point to any procurement request.

As Bristol City Council implements an end-to-end eProcurement suite from PROACTIS, encompassing purchase-to-pay, eSourcing, SRM and Contract Management processes, the organisation has made a new commitment to our technology with the addition of PROACTIS eCatalogues. This new module will replace the Authority’s previous @UK supplier catalogues facility, offering web-hosted catagloue content that can be managed by suppliers and shared across departments and other authorities with ease.

Following the success of Virgin Active’s PROACTIS initiative in the UK, the company has now extended its commitment to the spend control platform with a new project that will see PROACTIS P2P become the de-facto spend control platform across its Spanish and Portugese operations. The decision to implement PROACTIS P2P to support these growing European operations was taken after a successful UK project, which has seen the software deployed to streamline buying processes across Virgin’s head office and some 70+ health and fitness clubs.