Congratulations to the Business Improvement Award Winners for 2004!
2004 saw a number of our clients partaking in projects to improve their business. At our Christmas InTouch the following organisations were recognised for their project vision, the benefits they received and general positive impact that the project had made on their business overall.
Professional Advantage would like to congratulate them for their efforts and wish them continued success in 2005.
Overall Winner Operational Excellence: Borg Manufacturing
Project Goals
Borg Manufacturing, a kitchen door manufacturer of 15 years had three main project goals: to facilitate a business to business purchasing solution with the company's raw material supplier; to generate up-to-date inventory updates; and reduce double entry of information into multiple software programs.
Solution
Using the Great Plains integration tools eConnect and VBA, Borg Manufacturing were able to interface with their in-house developed software programs. As a result, they now had a fast purchasing solution, accurate inventory tracking and the ability to transfer and invoice inventory.
Primary benefits received
Purchase order entry process for their primary supplier now takes 1 hour instead of 4 hours (performed fortnightly), and the entry of manufactured stock is now automated. As a result, there is a reduced risk of incorrect data entry and a saving of up to 30 minutes per day. Using eConnect, the time taken to develop a solution which integrated their manufacturing processes into their ERP has been cut by 75%; expert knowledge is no longer required to perform this task.
Reporting and Business Analysis: A-Gas (Australia)
Project Goals
A-Gas wanted to improve their reporting and business analysis for their finance team. They had to heavily manipulate their FRx generated report, export it to Excel, copy it into their head office reporting package, and add calculations in order to generate the desired report.
Solution
Great Plains, Webhouse with Excel add-in and analysis services enabled A-Gas to produce the desired reports for finance without the time wasting or formatting. This also enabled the sales team (as well as other users) access to real time product profitability reports (in an excel format).
Further refinements to the dimensions in their GL cube could be identified.
Primary benefits received
Approximately 4 hours a month is saved. More staff are able to access the information through Excel without having to access FRx. It has also enabled delegation of collating Head Office reports to other people within the finance team.
Team Work: Diamond Australia
Project Goals
Diamond Australia wanted to achieve a number of goals; to minimise errors in production; reduce time in paper based tasks; locate orders at an exact position in order to provide accurate delivery details to customers; identify bottlenecks in production process so as to increase production throughput; effectively manage order processing and reduce products being shipped late due to poor production management.
Solution
A newly introduced bar coding system and Great Plains provided information that tracked orders in the production process, allowing users to access live production and ordering data published on the intranet.
Primary benefits received
Production is now more efficient and cost effective providing: an 80% reduction in the number of incorrect products being made; saving of 1-2 hours a day having eliminated manual creation of travellers (individual documents accompanying every production item). Staff now use the intranet based reporting on a daily basis and can ascertain accurate production status. As a result they are able to service their customers more efficiently.
Customer Service: Newfurn Floor Coverings
Project Goals
Primary goals for Newfurn were to simplify their claim submission process for their Member Stores, eliminate their manual handling and double entry and improve the reporting of claim statuses back to members.
Solution
An ASP.NET web interface designed for claim submission was implemented, together with eConnect, which enabled Newfurn to create sales order process transactions of the claims in Great Plains.
Primary benefits received
The major quantifiable result from this project was the 40% reduction in their outstanding claims balance at the end of each month. Central Office data entry has also been reduced as a result, due to the staff no longer having to double handle the claims.
