Portwest Dresses for Success with Infor

Workwear leader goes live on multi-tenant Infor CloudSuite Fashion to sustain growth and accelerate the integration of new acquisitions

LONDON – January 5, 2022 – Infor, the industry cloud company, today announced that workwear manufacturer and distributor Portwest has deployed Infor CloudSuite Fashion in a multi-tenant cloud deployment, running on Amazon Web Services. This upgrade will help Portwest create standardised processes throughout facilities in the United Kingdom, USA, Ireland, Poland, Dubai, Australia, Myanmar, China, Bangladesh, Italy, and Albania.

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Portwest has grown consistently at 24% per annum over the past two years and currently manufactures and distributes more than 1,800 products and 35,000 SKUs. The upgrade is the latest stage in an ongoing standardisation programme to help sustain that growth.

This programme most recently saw Portwest deploy the workflow and electronic data interchange (EDI) integration capabilities of Infor CloudSuite to improve collaboration with suppliers and customers. Portwest has also taken advantage of the Infor CloudSuite capabilities for documents such as pick sheets, invoices, order confirmation, statements, and dispatch notes. This has enabled Portwest to retire inefficient, legacy document management technologies.

The enhanced application will now enable Portwest to use internal invoicing to track the movement of goods more accurately and efficiently within the group, as well as form a template for the rapid integration of acquisitions.

Plans for 2022 include integrating factories in Bangladesh and Myanmar, plus onboarding an Albanian facility that is part of a recent Italian acquisition. Once a standard template is in place across these facilities, Portwest plans to deploy integrated business intelligence and analytics and begin the full automation of a UK warehouse.

“Our use of Infor has evolved as we have grown, from Infor M3 ERP on-premises through to M3 single-tenant cloud, and now the multi-tenant Infor CloudSuite because it has been a path of ever-increasing returns,” explained Paul Forry, head of information technology at Portwest. “This move to multi-tenant Infor CloudSuite also helps us address issues in the movement of our stock and forms a foundation for plans in the coming months to ensure standardized processes in our acquisition targets. We have aggressive plans to become a £1 billion company by 2025, and acquisitions and increasing our salesforce are going to be the main engines of that growth. We are also undertaking a deep examination of our customer profiles and looking at how we can diversify to sustain our double-digit growth. Infor CloudSuite will be at the heart of all of these initiatives.”

“Portwest is a textbook example of how moving from ERP to multi-tenant Infor CloudSuite can enable, accelerate and sustain substantial growth,” said Anwen Robinson, Infor general manager and senior vice-president for UK & Ireland. “From establishing improved processes to reducing costs by retiring legacy technology, and accelerating the onboarding of acquisitions, Portwest has demonstrated repeatedly why it is not only beneficial to harness the power of cloud technology, but that to drive growth, it is a necessity.”

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Media contact
Richard Moore
+447976111243
Richard.Moore@infor.com