Portwest Works for Success with Infor

Infor, a leading provider of beautiful business applications specialized by industry and built for the cloud, today announced that workwear manufacturer and distributor Portwest has extended its investment in Infor technology with an upgrade to Infor CloudSuite™ M3 via the Infor UpgradeX program. Infor M3 will help deliver greater consistency across Portwest’s six sites in the UK, Ireland, Poland, Dubai, Bangladesh and the US as the company continues to pursue its growth strategy.

Portwest is a leader in the manufacture and distribution of workwear apparel, boots and safety equipment with over 1,100 products and 9,500 SKUs. To help enable international growth at such a scale, Portwest chose a cloud deployment running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) not only to ensure consistency across different geographies and benefit from lower capital expenditure but also to ensure it remains on the most recent version of Infor M3 going forward.

“Taking our ERP into the cloud is a natural extension for us,” said Tony Kirby, finance director, Portwest. “We already take 85 percent of our orders online and we co-ordinate sales, production and finance throughout 84 countries. In order to maintain that kind of activity and growth, a cloud infrastructure is vital. We have seen that the cloud is just as fast, secure and simple as our previous on-premise applications, and the opportunities for integration with our supply chain management applications, as well as the options for enterprise mobility out in the field, make cloud an obvious choice.”

“As a micro-vertical within fashion, workwear exemplifies the old adage that you cannot sell what you don’t have,” said Andrew Dalziel, industry and solution strategy director, Infor. “Inventory, merchandise visibility, fast turnaround times and order fulfillment are the hallmarks of customer service in the industry and that means that at international scale, there needs to be consistency as the business grows. For companies like Portwest, Infor CloudSuite M3 helps to deliver that consistency as well as keep options open for future growth and evolution of business models.”