​Merit secures international “Go-Live” throughout Acco Brands European businesses

Acco Brands selected Merit Consulting to be their ISV partner, responsible for managing not only the Merit consultants involved, but also the deliveries from third party vendors.

The ACCO Brands teams throughout Europe are breathing a little easier now that a long-planned M3 project has gone live. The successful M3 launch on February 8 created a single ERP end-to-end system for all the company’s European businesses. It brought many “home-grown” systems and processes across the continent into a single, synchronized platform creating one system of record for Europe.

The fully operational M3 system will make it easier for areas like sourcing and procurement, inventory management, order entry, distribution, shipping and all the core supporting functions to collaborate and perform their roles effectively with greater efficiency.

“The project enables us to provide customers with more unique, up-to-date and accurate data and optimize staff productivity.” said Jay Mitchell, Senior Vice President ACCO Brands and President, Europe.

“Executing the conversion was a robust undertaking. Its successful implementation was the result of harmonious collaboration, hard work and great team spirit from every site and every function across Europe” said Chris Venters, Programme Manager for ACCO Europe..”

“Great team work was a critical success factor with the Merit and Acco people working together as a single project team “ said Mike Nutter, MD for Merit Consulting UK, “This resulted in the delivery of a high quality, robustly tested business solution”

The scale and impact of this change for ACCO Europe is unprecedented. Over 200 people played a part in the project. In addition, 400 employees at 17 ACCO Brands sites in 14 countries were trained on the system. Business systems affected by the implementation closed on Fri., January 29, and the new M3 V.13.2 system was available Mon., February 8.

“On February 8, the M3 system had as near a flawless go-live as could be expected,” Jay said. “There were small issues with the transition, with 84 percent of those being resolved on Day One.” He added: “We have had vendors and customers compliment us and comment that they had never seen such a smooth roll-out. This was a massive project. The outstanding success of our implementation is a credit to everyone involved.”