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Return on Investment
Software Hardware |
Glazpart Group Excels with EnterpriseIQ The road to continual improvement The introduction of a new ERP system was the next phase of Glazpart’s business development programme. Glazpart were looking for a system that would give them:
The Selection Process Glazpart reviewed the ERP marketplace and drew up a short list of four companies including EnterpriseIQ from IQMS. This list was narrowed down to two companies based on their experience within the Plastics Manufacturing Industry. From those two solutions Glazpart chose EnterpriseIQ. “The IQMS software provided a more comprehensive solution that was dedicated to Plastics Manufacturing” said Mark Nelson, FD of Glazpart. “Not only does the software have some great features that are specific to Plastics Manufacturing but IQMS understands what a Plastics Manufacturer does and what our problems are.” The Glazpart Vision Being a company of vision has enabled Glazpart to continue to compete aggressively in today’s difficult market conditions. Investing in quality equipment, state of the art distribution facilities and following sound manufacturing principles has given Glazpart an excellent reputation in the industry. “The main aim of the introduction of the ERP solution was to consolidate all of the company information into one integrated database solution”, says Roy Tabb, IT manager. “We also wanted to expand our systems capabilities to give us more control on the shop floor and relate the information that was available to our business critical issues, such as Customer service and improve communication within the company and to our customers and suppliers”. “It all boiled down to having better control of our business critical data. We wanted a single integrated solution that offered centralized, accurate and relevant data that was accessible to everyone in the company. In other words we wanted a system to support our vision.” Setting the expectations “Setting the expectations for the new system was the key to the success of the implementation” says mark Nelson, FD and company secretary. “Glazpart’s expectations were high so the challenge of achieving all of the objectives were challenging to both the software and the people”. Goals were set at each stage of the implementation and measured in terms of their completion and level of success. Multiple simulation runs were done so that Glazpart knew the processes would run smoothly and the results met their expectations or exceeded them. There was a lot of data to collect. Glazpart put Matty Keefe in charge of the data management. His responsibility was to ensure that all manufacturing data was accurate and supported the goals of production efficiency and accurate costing. Matty says “the tools in EnterpriseIQ and the fact that the system was designed for plastics manufacturing made it much easier to get our data into the system, we tested all types of data on a regular basis so that we knew it was good quality, essential for what we wanted to achieve”. The new warehouse was also one of the areas that was key to the company's future and it had to be supported by good warehouse management systems. “ We had used hand held scanners in the old warehouse but now we needed to get more agile in the warehouse and track inventory throughout the operation from the machines to the shelf with complete auditability”, said Dave Campbell, Quality and Warehouse manager. The Achievements “I can definitely say that EnterpriseIQ has been everything we expected and more”, say’s Mark Nelson. "We underestimated the benefits we would get from installing a system that was specific to our industry, the capabilities of EnterpriseIQ in the plastics manufacturing industry are a major factor in the success of our implementation. Right from the construction of the BOMs and the use of family tooling to the use of realtime information from our machines to the core of the planning systems has meant that the processes flow the way we operate our business. The tightly integrated system has meant that we don’t duplicate any information input at all through the whole process. Even my accounting information comes directly from the source to the P and L, all of the costs are accurate and month end has become a lot easier. We were so pleased with the improvements on the shop floor that we gave the setters and floor managers hand held devices so that they can see exactly what’s happening as they go about their daily routines.” The implementation of the manufacturing and distribution parts of the business have been an unqualified success. Glazpart are now embarking on a full CRM implementation. Roy Tabb comments “We have already seen some benefits from the customer communication standpoint, now we want to get the customer support side of things under control. EnterpriseIQ CRM will enable us to log support calls and follow them right through to returns and corrective action reporting in the quality modules. We can now start to ramp up our return on the investment we made in EnterpriseIQ." |
