When Tiri Group bought fast-growing label manufacturer Rapid Labels from Blue Star, Rapid Labels was faced with very tight deadlines to implement a new IT system from the ground up. CodeBlue won the business and succeeded in completing the implementation ahead of schedule and under budget.

Rapid Labels is a thriving label manufacturer operating from a purpose-designed facility in Auckland’s North Harbour Industrial Estate. Highly efficient label production lanes deliver on the Rapid Labels speed promise – quotes in two hours, proofs in four hours, labels in five days from sign off of proof, 99% on-time guaranteed. Everything in Rapid Labels’ business is done at pace. Annual sales top $23 million with a staff of 75 label specialists operating in several specific markets – wine labels, food & beverage labels, thermal labels, laser labels, and pharmacy dispensing labels – as well as making customised labels for clients nationwide. Rapid Labels is one of 11 businesses in the Tiri Group, contributing to around $200 million in annual turnover and employing more than 600 people around the country.

“We had to disentangle quickly from the Blue Star system and figure out how to go it alone,” says Rapid Labels General Manager Anne-Marie Sutton. “We did a scoping exercise and decided that outsourcing was the way forward. We didn’t want to have an in-house IT department, so we needed a provider that could design a new system and handle implementation and ongoing support – all to a very tight deadline.”

“We are absolutely delighted with CodeBlue’s ability to deliver on their promise. Everyone I talk to is surprised that the IT project was brought in ahead of time and under budget – that never happens. Meeting the time deadline was absolutely critical.  When the business was purchased by Tiri Group, we had 6 months before Blue Star’s incumbent IT service was switched off. “By the time we’d completed the initial scoping exercise and selected CodeBlue as our supplier, the time to implement was shorter than we anticipated. But CodeBlue came through on time. That was fantastic,” Sutton says.

A fully-outsourced solution

Rapid Labels uses Prism for job costing and financials, MYOB EXO for payroll and VIP for fixed assets, and – prior to the new CodeBlue system – a standard Microsoft 2000 desktop operating system platform. The company uses Apple Macs for the in-house label design team, with the requirement for integration between the Apple and Microsoft environments.

CodeBlue’s approach was to implement an in-house cloud. Rapid Labels had retained a new server at their Albany premises as a legacy of the shared services provided by Blue Star. CodeBlue General Manager Ian Funnell says that this meant it was most cost-effective for CodeBlue to maintain servers in- house rather than provide them via the cloud. CodeBlue’s solution was to implement a new in-house, fully virtualised
server farm using the existing computer room.

“We put new fibre into the customer’s Albany premises, upgraded workstations and installed latest versions of existing software. We support this via a full-service managed services support contract with remote monitoring and full Helpdesk support. We built a knowledge base to span all of Rapid Labels’ applications. The new system is working very well. We’re particularly pleased with user acceptance of our Helpdesk, which is giving fast response and very high first call solve rates for user problems,” Funnell says.

“Rapid Labels illustrates the success of CodeBlue’s strategy of focussing on IT services optimised for mid-sized businesses. This focus is resulting in a very high win rate against larger competitors,” says Ian Funnell.

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