Chesapeake to extend PECAS Vision ERP Roll-out to more than 30 plants worldwide.

SHEFFIELD, England—Radius Solutions Ltd. announced that Chesapeake Corp. is rolling out its PECAS Vision ERP system as its global standard to support production operations across all of its facilities around the world.

Founded in 1918 in West Point, Virginia, Chesapeake Corp. is a leading international supplier of value-added specialty paperboard and plastic packaging. Its customers include premier multi-national companies serving high-growth markets such as pharmaceutical and healthcare, and international premium branded products. The company produces a variety of products in the areas of paperboard packaging, folding cartons, leaflets, labels, composite tubes and booklets as well as plastic packaging, containers, bottles, preforms, and closures.

The organization has undergone significant organic and acquisitive growth, and needed to rationalize a variety of existing systems including; generic manufacturing ERP systems, home-grown solutions, and different versions of the PECAS Vision system. As a strategic solutions provider to Chesapeake for more than fifteen years, Radius Solutions was invited to bid on the global standardization project. Chesapeake went through a very thorough due diligence process which lasted for nearly 18 months before PECAS Vision was chosen. The process included highly targeted requirements definitions and specific testing using sample job criteria, to ensure the best solution fit.

Chesapeake will standardize on the latest release of PECAS Vision across more than 30 paperboard facilities around the world. The company required a global solutions provider with capabilities to support their operations in the UK, Europe, North America and China. By leveraging a single manufacturing system across all of its operations, it will allow Chesapeake to gain efficiencies, improve access to critical business information, and respond rapidly to customer needs. Because PECAS Vision has been specifically developed to address best practices in the packaging and printing industry, the solution can be efficiently rolled-out and scaled across new facilities, without the need for expensive and risky modifications to Chesapeake’s basic business requirements.

“Through acquisitive growth we already have nearly 30 sites running versions of PECAS, but they are of different ages and implemented in different ways by companies that had no previous association with each other,” said Maurice Crump, Director – Information Systems for Chesapeake. “Chesapeake provides a global service to blue chip customers and in order to do this efficiently we need to be working from a common platform. Changing a company’s main, business IT system is a significant investment and commitment. Therefore, although we had a solid relationship with Radius over many years, we felt we needed to conduct a review of possible options. At the end of the day, we felt that the PECAS system provided the best match to our requirements coupled with the knowledge that Radius Solutions has of our industry.”