Elevator and lift manufacturer Stannah Group has said it has made a “significant investment” in introducing cloud-based business software to modernize its IT systems and prepare for the company’s future growth.
Stannah is one of the UK’s leading engineering companies and remains an independent, family-owned business that has sold over 700,000 stairlifts worldwide. It now operates in more than 40 countries, with subsidiaries in 12 countries, including France, Italy and the USA.
The company will introduce IFS Cloud for enterprise resource planning (ERP), field service management (FSM), planning and scheduling optimization (PSO) and enterprise asset management (EAM).
The implementation of IFS Cloud will allow Stannah to replace the existing legacy system and 67 edge systems with a new enterprise offering, which will provide real-time visibility across company departments.
Stannah said that for the first time, all of its employees in 13 countries will be aligned on a “modern and cohesive solution” that brings together all of Stannah’s operational functions from manufacturing to field service management. When fully implemented, the new system will support more than 2,500 users.
Nick Stannah, joint managing director of Stannah Home Accessibility, said this was a major project for Stannah and the cornerstone of a new IT strategy to modernize the entire Stannah Group IT estate.
“Our legacy systems have served us well, but we’ve grown significantly over the past decade and plan to continue to build on that,” he said. “We have a lot of technical debt in a lot of legacy systems and an infrastructure that is not connected and no longer fit for purpose,” he told Computer Weekly.
Stannah said the group also has many international companies running separate systems and needs to move to a globally integrated enterprise-wide IT platform that can better support its business growth plans.
“Our new IT strategy aims to ensure that IT enables the Group to achieve its future business goals,” he said. “Moving to cloud services and modernizing our entire infrastructure allows us to achieve this, providing scalability, flexibility and security for our growing business.”
Stannah said the company chose IFS as its cloud ERP provider after a “very thorough” selection process during 2023. “IFS’s perpetual cloud solution means we can continue to modernize our platform as technology evolves,” he said, adding that IFS is a good choice for Stannah as it can provide the range of functionality the company requires, “providing highly capable solutions for our manufacturing and field services”.
The company is at the very beginning of this project, and it is currently in the planning phase. “This will be a significant undertaking,” he said.
He created a team of dedicated people from across the company who will see the project through to completion and will work on audits of current systems to assess business needs and processes before starting to train every staff member on the system.
The first phase of the rollout is likely to go live around January 2026, when Stannah will implement it in its manufacturing facilities, as well as across all of its trading operations in the UK and France. The second phase will see the system rolled out across all of the company’s other international businesses over the next two years.
Improving user experience
Among the wider business benefits that Stannah is looking to gain will be standardized business processes that will deliver significant efficiency improvements across the business. The project will also lead to an improved user experience for employees using business systems and an improved customer service experience.
It should also offer real-time business reports and integrated data to improve business decisions, and improve planning and scheduling of operations in Stannah’s manufacturing and field services.
As the project only started in January, Stannah said it was still early days. “The key focus is not just developing solutions, but also communicating our strategy and plans with everyone in the business to prepare our people for the changes the system will bring,” he said. “This will be a big change for our people and we need to provide the necessary change management, training and support for everyone to succeed.”
The move to a cloud-based system will drive efficiency and productivity for Stannah by enabling it to run a wide range of operational functions on a single platform with a single data model, the companies said. Initially, this will include customer relationship management, sales, planning, supply chain, manufacturing, human capital management, finance, asset management and field services.
“By streamlining business processes, the new system will enable greater responsiveness in the service offered to customers, increasing productivity and efficiency, including first-time repair rates, route planning and more,” Stannah said.
IFS said its AI-powered PSO engine will also streamline Stannah’s field services, helping to implement cost-effective route planning and solve complex scheduling problems. Using EAM and PSO in tandem will ensure Stannah can optimize asset uptime and maintenance time, IFS said. The company will also use IFS Success Services to support customers from adoption and engagement to software support. Stannah has also invested in IFS Implementation Services, which IFS offers its customers to help them implement their software.
Enterprise cloud adoption continues to grow at a rapid pace. According to technology analyst Gartner, cloud computing is in the process of transitioning from technological disruption to necessity. An analyst recently predicted that by 2028, modernization efforts will culminate in 70% of workloads running in the cloud, up from 25% in 2023. He said that this year, user spending worldwide is expected to public cloud services to reach $679 billion – and likely to exceed $1 billion in 2027.