the quest for the perfect ERP solution
episode four 'the chair man'
Continuing on his mission to find wonderful new erps, David meets the team at Boss Design - a leading manufacturer of luxurious corporate office and conference seating.
Learn more about the ERP solution that allowed Boss design to grow their business by 18% year on year whilst still improving delivery and reducing costs and inventory.
Marvel at David's pearls of management wisdom which include trying to convince Boss Design to replace their highly experienced and extremely skilled workforce with robots....to save money on loo roll.
Boss Design manufactures high quality contract seating which encompasses all aspects of the office, hotel and conference markets. They are at the cutting edge of British design and many of their clients are architects and blue chip organisations. A division of The Boss Group is KOMAC - a forward thinking, dynamic manufacturer of exclusive and diverse operator, reception and meeting room seating. Both have their own manufacturing and sales operations.
Boss discovered that with business growth comes business complexity, a huge increase in the need for business intelligence and heightened customer expectation. They recognised that if the business was to grow, they needed to raise the standard of their operational and manufacturing processes.
A key factor in this change programme was the introduction of a SYSPRO ERP system covering financial, manufacturing and distribution from K3 Business Technology Group. Prior to this, both operations relied on a mixture of PC packages for accounting and sales and manual production control systems.
The previous sales system simply recorded sales details, but with a huge number of product permutations covering chair bases, arms and materials as well as 5000 different fabric and colour variations, it was not uncommon for mistakes to occur. Similarly, with little effective shop-floor planning, different product sections tended to determine their own work plans and this would mean that they could easily be working on different orders. As a result lead times were too long and waste was too high.
Both businesses have now been literally transformed thanks to the carefully planned implementation and development of the SYSPRO ERP system. SYSPRO's Sales Order Processing and Product Configurator modules have eliminated a major source of wastage and mistakes. Additionally the group has developed greater financial controls.
The biggest change has been in terms of production, where the new system is providing the factories with the information needed to drive their increasingly lean environments, which are based around assembly to order, minimum WIP, limited on-site raw materials stocks and on time delivery.
Boss have practically eliminated order mistakes and combining this with the vastly improved visibility of demand and the ability to effectively schedule work they have seen lead times come down, there is much less waste - both in terms of manpower, material and improved customer service - all whilst still achieving massive growth. In fact, such is Boss Design's commitment to sustainable business practises, they have recently been awarded the 2009 Queens Award for Enterprise for Sustainable Development - the only furniture manufacturer to achieve this accolade.
Read the whole story in our case study or visit our website for more information about SYSPRO ERP.
