About the Client:
The client is a pioneer in attractive chair designs coupled with superior quality and comfort. For over 30 years, The client has been building and marketing custom chairs to meet specific customer needs. They have a unique bill of materials assembly process that accommodates every type of chair customization from the fabric to leathers to specific size requirements. They use a nationwide dealer network that has extensive experience with helping customers design the component pieces desired to create the most innovative and comfortable products they are looking for.
Challenge:
The client’s extensive dealer and rep network for order processing, tracking and shipping was very manual. Sales orders from the field were received via fax to the customer service teams and passed to the accounting team for entry into the Infor Visual Enterprise ERP solution. Orders would be processed and the assembly teams in the warhouse would begin scheduling assembly of customer components, building the finished goods, scheduling delivery dates and shipping the product to the customers. Customer service had very little visibility to the status of sales orders once they were passed to the accounting team. The ERP for a number of reasons did not present the best option for extending visibility of orders to the customer service team in an efficient and intuitive way for them to manage the complexity of the network they supported.
They needed a solution that Integrated sales order receipt with order creation and processing in the ERP application where sales orders would be generated. In addition they desperately needed better real time visibility to sales orders status from receipt of order through shipment. In addition the team had many challenges with managing bill of materials inventory and future demand from customer service orders in process. This created inaccurate estimated to actual delivery date results to dealer network customers.
Solution:
Annexus solutions developed a plan that would create a stand alone web based platform that integrated via APIs to the ERP solution. The platform would resolve the issues of manually passing sales orders to accounting and address the lack of supply chain event visibility from order entry to shipment within the ERP commercial software solution.
Here are a few features we designed into the system:
- Customer service summary views of the orders to help get a bird’s eye view of order status
- Project management views of customer orders where customer service could detail the Bill of material items on faxes received to API sourced Item IDs in the ERP system. Creation of resulting sales orders in the ERP were accurate and less time consuming.
- Production views of BOM inventory from the ERP to gain insight into inventory availability to build new custom finished goods. Visibility to bill of materials items on sales orders not shipped, On hand and on order of materials items to assist with ensuring BOM items are available for assembly and timely shipment.
- Complex filtering tools to help manage orders by dealer rep and dealer rep region.
- Accounting data views such as aged invoicing
- Summary of customer information, including total order amount, last order amount, details of customer, territory, and date of order
Benefits:
The software proved to be an immensely supportive tool in supply chain management processes and helped the company in the following ways:
- Streamlined sales order receipt to ERP generation reducing man hours per job with more real time visibility to customer service.
- Reduced time and effort needed to generate and manage orders in the ERP system by accounting
- Better clarity to understand the daily status of pending orders
- Extend supply chain operations within the business for higher efficiency and accuracy
- Enhanced ability to manage bill of materials inventory demand planning by tying new sales order to project bill of materials items inventory. This resulted in reduced out of stocks, long lead times and lost sales due to poor delivery expectations and cancellations.
If you are looking for solutions to incorporate with your existing ERP system, our team of project managers designers and developers have just the right solutions expertise to assist you. Contact us for more information.