The Company

BTJ InfoData AB is a Swedish group of companies comprising two main subsidiaries: BTJ and InfoData. The group has approximately 900 employees and a turnover of over ?140 million. With their Headquarters based in Lund and offices throughout Sweden, they also have subsidiaries in Denmark and Finland.

BTJ InfoData AB develop and supply information services and media products to libraries, universities, schools, booksellers, publishers, companies and institutions throughout Scandinavia.

Challenge

Although the group already had many systems in place, purchase agreements were being handled manually so a new application was required to deal with these while interacting with the systems already in existence. Due to the diverse infrastructure of the organisation, Wide Area Network (WAN) technology was a prerequisite.

Solution

A modular and tailor-made system was developed in NetPlus and MS SQL Server by BTJ's consultants, Client Consulting. They created a flexible application to handle the purchase transaction processes of the company. It was installed in a Citrix environment to provide access anywhere in their organisation via their WAN. The project started in March 2004 and the first version was up and running by June 2004.

The outcome

Jan Lindberg, Purchase Manager is very pleased with the new system and comments: "The application is very flexible and it is easy to implement new functions. We can easily find information about our purchase agreements (over 2000 of them) wherever we are situated in our organisation."

"Gaining control of our purchase agreements has represented a lot of savings for the group - we can now avoid missing critical dates in purchase agreements; we can easily see which vendors are available to us and to what terms; and most importantly our Management can now do analysis of the whole purchase stock. The speed of development of the application was due to the unique abilities of the NetPlus tools supplied by the Sapphire Group and leaves us well positioned to further enhance and maintain the application as our business needs change."