Manufacturing Management | Case Study: ATG Access and Priority ERP
01 Feb, 2022
Manufacturing Management | Published: 27/01/2022
Established in 1989, ATG Access Ltd is a leading manufacturer of hostile vehicle mitigation bollards, road blockers and barriers. It is one of the UK's leading security engineering companies, providing physical perimeter security solutions for sites around the world that include The Shard in London, The Bund in Shanghai, and Los Angeles Airport, LAX as well as projects that have included the 2012 London Olympics.
Now part of HS Security, a division of Hill and Smith PLC, ATG Access is based in the Merseyside, with four manufacturing facilities in the UK, Singapore, the UAE and the USA. Beyond this, ATG has a network of over twenty international partners. It is a notable international success story with more than a decade of exporting products to a variety of countries.
Built originally on success in the residential security market, ATG Access unveiled their first automatic rising bollards in 1991, and in in 2005 secured PAS 68 accreditation by successfully dead-stopping a bollard with a 7.5-tonne truck travelling at 80kph. This was followed by further innovation in 2007 as ATG designed and tested the first shallow foundation bollard and took their market leading technology to overseas markets, namely Singapore, Malaysia and the UAE..Since then, ATG Access has sent products to over forty countries and currently employs approximately seventy-five people across manufacture, installation, after-sales and maintenance.
Technology at the heart of growth
Priority ERP has been a vital component of this success story. Following a thorough review of the market, Priority was chosen, with implementation by leading UK partner Medatech. Implemented following a 2007 MBO (management buy-out), Priority has been vital in providing standardised, best practice processes that have driven growth.
Ian Brooks, service manager at ATG Access explains: “Our leadership has always been driven by a pragmatic approach. This meant that from the beginning, we looked for a system of record that was focussed on manufacturing and could deliver a centralised ERP that enabled us to scale quickly.”
Growth dominated these initial concerns, specifically improving the management of work orders and sub-contractors. At the same time, there was a need to rationalise customer information from several separate databases into a single central store for use by the whole organisation. This necessitated a single system instead of a range of different departmental spreadsheets. Looking at production, there was also a need for project management to be fully integrated with the other disciplines of the business, especially the control of inventory, including stocks held by the servicing department. This would need to be summarised into an integrated reporting capability for costs and revenues throughout different ledgers.