\\\ Manufacturing \\\ Success story
The coatings industry is not a high-margin business, therefore the organisation has to operate at the lowest possible cost, yet at the same time, try to differentiate itself from the competition.
Inevitably, because the overall costs have come down, there’s a transaction cost reduction.”
Future plans
<< International’s products are heavy, and because of toxicity, their movements are constrained by regulations. So in the US (Houston) and Europe (UK and Sweden), the factories are centralized as single sources of supply for their respective regions. In Asia, the production picture is more complex because of local taxation and import regulations. International also has many sales offices to take orders in local languages.
Consistent products and services
Adopting QAD MFG/PRO worldwide has enabled International Coatings, an Akzo Nobel business unit, to compete across the world by ensuring consistent products and services for its customers in any location. Additionally, the low cost of installation and ownership means International Coatings can operate identical systems wherever it operates in the world. This is key to providing its customers with consistent products and services wherever their customers are operating. “MFG/PRO’s low cost of ownership is a definite advantage,” said Burnett. “The overall cost of IT with QAD is cheaper. In terms of how many people you need to run it, how easy it is to modify and upgrade, the cost of owner ship –
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the whole package is definitely lower. It’s a much less complex package to manage.”
MFG/PRO also interfaces easily to other systems International’s overall systems model includes laboratory and sales-support systems, but the main interfaces with MFG/PRO are to Quantum, International’s crucial health, safety and environmental management system, and Eagle RFExpress bar-coding and scanning software. International is currently extending it’s model to include a warehouse manage - ment system WISE from Royal 4 Systems. “We did the whole of Europe with QAD MFG/PRO applications, which has 19 sites, in 2 1/2 years,” said Burnett. MFG/PRO’s major benefit to International is the standardisation it facilitates. Burnett continued: “We now have a very low cost infrastructure and a very low cost support structure with QAD. Everybody within the company does everything the same way, and therefore the cost of training, retraining, and internally agreeing how things should be done is significantly less as a result. MFG/PRO is a lot quicker to implement than others, and we definitely saved money as a result of this. We’ve automated a lot of previously manual tasks and we’ve saved a lot of integration costs because of the standardization. MFG/PRO has reduced product inventories and labour costs. We have better supply chain visibility.
International Coatings is in the midst of migrating from earlier versions of MFG/PRO to MFG/PRO eB, and has found QAD’s ease of migration, even with earlier product modifications, an important benefit for future planning. The company is also planning to evaluate eB Desktop, the current version’s net user interface, as part of that process. For manufacturers who want to increase efficiency and profitability through web trading, the MFG/PRO eB software suite delivers a foundation for web-enabled ERP at a low total cost of ownership. International Coatings will continue to use its own interface until it completes this migration to eB at the beginning of 2003. “The migration to new versions of QAD MFG/PRO has gone very well,” said Burnett. “We now have it running in our first pilot site very successfully in Asia, and we intend to roll that out during 2002 and the early part of 2003 to all 37 sites. We don’t see any problem in doing that, and that says a lot about the nature of the upgradeability of QAD solutions.”
Highlights
COMPANY
Company Name: International Coatings business unit of the Coatings Division, Akzo Nobel. Industry: Industrial products. Products: Anti-corrosion and anti- fouling coatings products to the shipping and offshore industries.
SOLUTIONS
QAD Enterprise Applications: MFG/PRO. Hardware Platform: Hewlett-Packard running HPUX.
Time to implement: 30 months. Number of sites: 37.
RESULTS
• Rapid and low cost to implement. • Low cost of ownership. • Achieved standardised business processes to provide world-class service in a globally competitive environment.
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