Liberty Specialty Steel, which has business units in several industrial centers in the UK, with subsidiaries in Stokesbridge, Rotherham, Fort William, Hartlepool, Scunthorpe, Sheffield and Bolton, is using cloud software from Infor to fuel its growth.
The Specialized Steel Plant was previously owned by Tata Steel and when it was sold to Liberty House in 2017 for £ 1, it had to replace SAP systems covering finance, human resources and engineering within a strictly 12-month timeframe. p>
Chris Smith, CIO of Liberty Specialty Steel, has been brought in to lead the IT transition. His previous experience included internships at HMV, Waterstones and Pret a Manger.
Each of the company's factories has a different product line, and they also have a complex ecosystem of different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, he said.
Some of this legacy was in SAP.
Regarding the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure behind Infor, Smith said, "If it's good enough for the US Army, it's good enough for me." .
Earlier this year, Smith spoke at the Inspire conference for Infor clients in Amsterdam and told Computer Weekly about some of the considerations behind his strategy.
Liberty Specialty Steels plans to deploy Infor CloudSuite Industrial Enterprise based on its Infor-first technology policy, Smith said. He noted that one of the advantages of Infor over competing Oracle and Microsoft technology suites is that Infor does not require infrastructure investment.
The company has also invested in Infor CloudSuite HCM, Infor Expense Management and Infor Configure Price Quote (CPQ).
