Durbin Plc

“We chose MadiSun and Dimensions because of the excellent flexibility of the software itself, and the quality of accompanying implementation and support.”

With almost 40-years of experience and a highly dedicated team, Durbin Plc is one of the country’s leading suppliers of pharmaceutical products. Starting out as traditional chemists, Durbin’s focus shifted gradually towards logistics. Today, the company exports branded and generic pharmaceuticals (produced mainly in Europe and the US) to countries around the world. Its many customers include hospitals, charities and government agencies.

Durbin’s levels of service are second to none: in June 2002, following nomination by one of its clients, the company won the Alliots Export Award. This reflects the company’s commitment to a comprehensive, one-stop service. It handles every aspect of the export process, including freight and packaging, insurance, storage and customs requirements – and, wherever possible, consolidates requirements into a single shipment.

In early 2002, Durbin chose Access Accounts Dimensions and a MadiSun ERP Supply Chain solution, to help the company achieve its aim of increasing annual turnover to £20m.

The decision was made after an extensive review of the market. “We looked at Sage but it just wasn’t flexible enough,” says Export Manager Philip O’Reilly. In particular, the true multi-currency processing offered by Dimensions compared very favourably with Sage, which needed different customer accounts for each currency.

“We chose MadiSun and Dimensions because of the excellent flexibility of the software itself, and the quality of accompanying implementation and support. We are receiving excellent help from our Access Specialist Centre. It has even written special utilities to help us input the data which is currently held in a multitude of formats,” says Philip.

Strong sales order processing software is essential for Durbin, which advertises that its team of health and logistics personnel can arrange all pharmaceutical requirements with just one phone call, fax or email. The challenges are immense: Durbin must meet the strict export requirements of over 85 different countries and comply with MCA and WHO regulations on the storage and delivery of hazardous or fragile medicines.

Philip is confident that the MadiSun-Dimensions combination meets these challenges: “It will allow us to keep an accurate view of our stocks and monitor the expiry dates which are so crucial to our business,” he says.

In addition to detailed stock requirements, MadiSun provides all the functionality needed to plan and control the progress of complex orders, and to handle purchase and sales order processing. It also has facilities for resource planning, time recording, job costing and web-based order processing.

The link with Dimensions multiplies the value of the MadiSun solution. Any business transaction that effects the financials is sent straight through to Dimensions; conversely, MadiSun automatically reads Dimensions records to establish information such as customer credit status.

Entering information just once and allowing it flow around the business eliminates all the time, effort and errors associated with re-keying. At the same time, by collating financial data from across the company into Dimensions, Durbin also gain the power, security and reporting capacity of a SQL Server database.

This combination has proven so successful that Durbin are already planning to open up MadiSun to a further twenty operatives.