Resene upgrades to cope with growth

By ADAM GIFFORD

Resene Paints has bought a Movex enterprise software system from Swedish company Intentia to help it cope with projected growth.

IT manager Paul Gruschow said Movex V12 would replace Imas, an older financials package developed by IBM in Australia for the AS/400 platform, a Batchmaster production application and a home-grown distribution system.

He said the company installed an Advance Retail system from Auckland company Data Group into its 55 Resene Colour shops last year.

"We now want to close the gap between the system in our shops and our back-end system."

Resene, owned by the Nightingale family, is the largest New Zealand-owned paint company. It has about 600 staff, 60 of whom will use the new system.

As well as Movex financials, distribution, inventory and manufacturing modules, Resene will install an advanced production planning module. It will stick with the IBM AS/400 hardware platform, now known as the iSeries.

Gruschow said the system could eventually be used in other companies in the Resene group, including its Australian and Fijian paint subsidiaries, its high-performance and automotive-paint arm and Altex Coverings, its marine-paint business.

Intentia Australia and New Zealand's managing director, Steve Ironside, said Intentia New Zealand made a small profit last year on revenue of about $6 million, and should increase revenue this year to $10 million.

Internationally the company posted a loss last year of 56 million Swedish kronor ($11.7 million) on revenue of 4000 million kronor ($838.3 million).

Ironside said the losses came from the costs of developing the company's next-generation product, version 12, which involved a complete rewrite of the core Movex product in Java.