Bafta award-winning cameraman Rob Drewett’s hi-tech film equipment company Motion Impossible uses MRPeasy manufacturing software to scale up business and find holes in their processes.
About Motion Impossible
Motion Impossible produces hi-tech dolly systems for the film and TV industry. The company was founded in 2014 by BAFTA award-winning cameraman Rob Drewett and product design engineer Andy Nancollis. Since then, the Yate, South Gloucestershire based company has grown to provide employment to 18 film tech lovers, experienced engineers, and remote vehicle fanatics that help create new and exciting ways to shoot film, TV, and 360° virtual reality.
Growing complexity created need for ERP
Even though the products Motion Impossible creates have always been highly complex, up until 2019 they were using spreadsheets to manage all of their supply chain, inventory, and production data. With the launch of a new product line that had significantly more intricate requirements for manufacturing, they realised they needed to look for an ERP system.
“We needed a better way to handle it – the complexity of our new product compared to the older models was overwhelming for a spreadsheet-based system,” says Andy Nancollis, the co-founder and Chief Design Officer of Motion Impossible.
There was one obstacle: no one in the company had any experience with ERP systems.
Online investigation led to MRPeasy
Nancollis took it upon himself to find out what the best solution for their specific needs was. The requirements set by the team were quite simple: the software needed to be cloud-based, offer strong inventory management and BOM functionalities, and to be uniform in the sense that it would fit the business without the need for any special customisation.
“The cost was a big factor as well – most ERP systems are big and quite expensive and so MRPeasy stood out from the start,” Nancollis says.
Learning to use an ERP system from scratch
With no previous experience in the realm of ERP systems, Nancollis and their Operations Manager, Lyndsey Crossing, started to implement MRPeasy on their own, with Crossing at the helm.
“Lyndsey had never used an ERP, either, but she has done a terrific job learning up on it on the job and we are very glad of what we have achieved so far,” Nancollis explains. “It’s an on-going process, but we knew we were not going to jump from nothing to full implementation all at once.”
Nancollis finds that there is nothing that would speak better about the usability and user-friendliness of their new ERP system than the fact that they feel comfortable exploring it by themselves, using the support materials available on the software provider’s website.
As to the benefits that the new system provides, Nancollis describes it as a support system that is working in the background, unnoticeably supporting them at every step.
“MRPeasy is like a silent partner for us; we don’t always realise how much we are leaning on it,” he says. “But we just couldn’t do a job without it, as it provides us with all the accurate information we need for the products we build. It also helps us find holes in our process and fix them.”
Read the full case study on MRPeasy’s blog.
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