ONE of last year’s Press Business Awards winners is back with hopes of repeating its success in 2018.

Fresh from winning the Employer of the Year title at the last event, Catalyst IT Solutions has put itself forward for the Business Innovation of the Year and Small Business of the year titles.

The business, based at York Science Park, employs a team of 14 staff who work to create IT solutions to help customers run their businesses more effectively, by enabling them to manage and accelerate their performance.

Working with manufacturing, wholesale distributors, retail/online retailers, IT and technology companies, Catalyst’s core propositions are a Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution and a business intelligence solution (BI).

Catalyst’s solutions work with other software vendors, including NetSuite, which is used by more than 40,000 businesses in more than 180 countries.

Carrie Mulligan, head of marketing at Catalyst said: “The software manages the entire business extremely well.

“However, we saw the opportunity to expand its functionality and respond to requests received from customers, to further eliminate manual processes.

“We did not want to leave this idea as a promising napkin sketch and miss the opportunity to help our customers, potential new prospects and customers who were already partnered elsewhere for NetSuite.

“At the same time, it would allow us to create our own Intellectual Property and a new revenue stream.”

In addition to implementing the standard NetSuite platform into a range of manufacturing, wholesale distribution and retail customers, Catalyst created the WMS Go platform in response to customers’ needs for additional functionality to fulfil orders more quickly and accurately, ensure the accuracy of inventory and to gain real-time visibility into their warehouse operations.

Catalyst says it remains committed to additional product development and now creates “suite bundles” made up of common software customisations.

To promote the Suite Bundle range, the business approached the Leeds Enterprise Partnership (LEP) to secure digital funding. This was accepted, and they won £4,000 of funding towards a £5,000 project enhancing their website and showcasing the new range of products.

Within three years Catalyst expect consistently recurring revenues from the sale of its WMS Go solution and Suite Bundles.