Sweden's Intentia takes on big names

By ADAM GIFFORD

Swedish enterprise software company Intentia is making waves in New Zealand, with its Movex suite replacing SAP as software of choice for plastics manufacturer Vertex.

Intentia is also being considered alongside SAP to supply financials and distribution systems for dairy giant Fonterra.

The company was started 15 years ago to build business and manufacturing software to run on IBM AS/400 servers. Recently it produced versions to run on other platforms, the result of a research and development effort launched five years ago to rebuild Movex in the Java language.

Intentia suffered after the pre-Y2K sales boom, but has picked up, with 30 per cent growth last quarter.

Founder and chief executive Bjorn Algkvist said growth would be fuelled by companies moving into electronic collaboration and collaborative supply chains based on internet protocols. That put the pressure on Intentia to cover a broad range of customer needs.

The company had established credibility here since arriving four years ago.

"We are now automatically invited to the dance when people are buying applications," he said.

One of those invitations came from Vertex, which was Carter Holt Harvey Plastics before a management buy-out. IT manager Dee Ankersmit said Vertex had a limited time to find replacement systems before it had to leave the Carter Holt Harvey shared services environment, which ran SAP.

Vertex opted for Movex on AS/400 because it was likely to require less maintenance than competing platforms, and it could be implemented reasonably quickly. It will have about 150 users in four manufacturing plants, the Albany head office and distribution centres in Australia and New Zealand.

Vertex has a turnover of about $90 million manufacturing more than 3000 items from plastic drums to disposable cups and vaccination syringes. The system is to go live next June.