Vanquish Hardware Protection: 25% growth in the first year on MRPeasy

Vanquish Hardware Protection makes intumescent products that protect the hardware on fire doors. Hinges, locks, closers: the components that have to keep working long enough for a door to do its job in a fire. It is a niche within a niche, and Vanquish has grown fast in it.

Fast growth is exactly what exposed the cracks in how production was being run. This is how the company went from Sage 50 and spreadsheets to MRPeasy, and what happened to the numbers afterwards.

A young company with decades of experience behind it

Vanquish was founded in January 2021, but the people behind it have been in fire protection manufacturing since the early 1990s. The products sit discreetly behind hinges and around lock mechanisms and expand when exposed to heat, protecting the hardware and helping the door keep its structural integrity.

Demand climbed quickly. By the end of 2024 the company had 22 employees and a turnover just shy of £3 million, selling off the shelf products, bespoke solutions and a white label service for resellers. The ambition was to diversify and keep scaling. The systems were not going to allow it.

Where the old way broke down

Vanquish had inherited a production set up from its predecessor business: Sage 50 for the accounts, and spreadsheets for everything else. At low volumes it worked well enough. As orders grew it became the bottleneck.

There was no single point of failure. It was the accumulation of manual and duplicate work across departments. Orders went into Sage, then were recreated by hand in Excel because production kept its own documents. Labels, specifications and work instructions lived in separate places. Accounts and admin were forever going back and forth to get a full picture.

“Our processes relied heavily on manual coordination, from scheduling in Excel to managing labelling and gathering production information,” Sales Director Mike Sutcliffe explains. “While this approach supported the business for a time, it became clear that it wasn’t scalable for our growing operation.”

The occasional material mismatch or quantity discrepancy meant rework, which meant pressure on the schedule. “Sage is really accounting software. It certainly doesn’t help you with manufacturing, production scheduling, or live stock tracking, so we realised that we were lagging behind and needed a new system if we wanted to keep growing.”

An email that started it

Vanquish did not begin with a formal ERP shortlist. They knew a change was needed but had not yet worked out what it should look like. Then an email from us landed. We are a UK implementation partner for MRPeasy, and that email introduced the team to the system.

“We had been thinking that a change was needed for a while without getting into a lot of detail yet as to what that should look like,” Mike says. “Then we received a timely email from Smart Manufacture, and that started us down the MRPeasy route right then.”

They did look at one alternative. It felt over complicated and too much like the tools they were trying to escape. “The alternatives still looked complicated, like Sage all over again. MRPeasy does what it says on the tin. It’s simple and intuitive.”

The trial settled it. “I jumped on the trial, and within half an hour, I could already see how everything fits together.”

Go live without the drama

With our support, Vanquish started implementing MRPeasy around October 2024. Rather than rolling everything out at once, the priority was making the day to day easier first. MRPeasy is built to be largely self implemented, with dozens of demo videos and a chatbot trained on the software, and Vanquish made good use of both.

“The live chatbot is brilliant, and the support team gets back to you promptly with great replies. I can’t fault them,” Mike comments. Within a few months the company was putting orders through the new system.

The shop floor felt it first. Instead of printouts, production staff now see live work orders, specifications and stock availability on tablets and workstation computers. “People aren’t second guessing the data anymore. Our shop floor staff have direct access to info that’s relevant to them. It has stopped people running around trying to source information.”

Admin and accounts got the same bird’s eye view. Vanquish also moved its accounting from Sage to Xero, which has a native MRPeasy integration, so order processing and cost tracking now flow through without rekeying.

Fewer errors, live stock, OTIF above 99%

The quickest win was live inventory. Stock levels are accurate and shared across the business in real time, so the old worry about double booking or picking the wrong material has gone.

Order handling, once a chain of workarounds and duplicate entry, is now straightforward. “We can load orders and book materials in seconds or use a customer issued part number with zero workarounds,” Mike says. Interestingly, Vanquish still schedules production largely by hand rather than using the automated scheduler, and still finds the difference enormous. “Even so, MRPeasy’s scheduling simplicity has definitely made a huge difference in managing production.”

Being able to attach work files and specifications to a work order through the OneDrive integration has been a favourite on the workshop floor. “That direct OneDrive link in the order has been incredibly useful.”

Clearer scheduling and fewer production errors show up where customers notice. “Our OTIF is now constantly above 99%. It’s never been better!”

The result: 25% growth with one or two extra people

The lesson Vanquish draws is that staying on spreadsheets too long quietly caps growth. By centralising production data, cutting manual work and giving everyone the same live picture, the company could scale with the market without losing control.

Mike sums it up: “In the first year after going live, we grew in revenue by 25% while adding just one or two new employees. There’s no way we could have done that without MRPeasy. Certainly not without bringing in a lot more people. So, my advice is to just go for it! There’s nothing that would hold me back from going ahead with this system as an SME.”

Sound familiar?

If your accounts package is being asked to run production and the spreadsheets are multiplying, you are where Vanquish was in 2024. Have a look at MRPeasy, or talk to us about whether it fits your operation. We will tell you honestly if it does not.