 The Mansfield Group comprises 26 companies employing close to 700 people. It includes Citywest Hotel, Weston Executive Airport, Finnstown House Hotel and the 5 star PGA National Golf Club at Palmerstown House, along with a range of other businesses. The Group has undertaken a million-euro upgrade of its IT infrastructure, as well as implementing an ERP system to suit its diverse business operations.
“It is imperative that we have reliable, accurate and up to date information available to all key decision makers within the group”, explains Linda Lockhart, Group Accounts IT Manager at The Mansfield Group. “We wanted a solution that could link the financial information across the entire group, automate accounts, integrate with the hospitality management system and save finance employees hours every day”.
Datapac, The Mansfield Group’s IT solution provider, was appointed to optimise the business and to provide consultation, installation, implementation, training and on-going support services. Datapac implemented Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution to manage the financial and management information within the group. This will help streamline processes, improve efficiencies, provide accurate reporting capability and full visibility of work in progress and inventory values
“We supplied a solution to bring the Group’s technology stack up to another level”, says Gerry Power, ERP Division Manager at Datapac. To make the system operational, there was data migration from four legacy systems for 10 companies. The new solution integrates with Fidelio Opera and Adest document management system which allows detailed control of all operations in one management solution. .
“The advantage of the ERP system is having all the group’s information in one repository”, continues Linda. “What differentiates Dynamics Nav is how much you can configure it to suit different roles within the organisation”. The easy access to information, improved functionality and faster processing of data has reduced the time spent on the system.
“We wanted the most reliable, reputable technology on which to build a future-proofed financial system for the company”, concludes Linda. “Datapac really knows about integrated business solutions – we were impressed with their speed of response, flexibility and their abundance of business expertise. We now have the system that we were looking for at a relatively low cost of ownership that will support our future plans”.
Datapac integrated a business continuity solution into The Mansfield Group’s data network using technology from VMWare, HP, Double-Take, Microsoft and Symantec. Using VMWare ESX the Group is able to host virtual replicas of their production environment off site. This provides the infrastructure to allow online replication for The Mansfield Group’s email, servers and applications by mirroring them to a hot site location which is also based at Citywest. Datapac also implemented Double-Take which, each night, provides an incremental back up for the system state of the remaining servers and rebuilds an updated image of same in the hot site providing disaster recovery services for all servers. The Mansfield Group also upgraded their Citywest domain as part of the project.
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