From a weekend co-operative selling organic foods in Auckland,
Ceres has grown up to be at the forefront of the organic food
movement in New Zealand.
After thirty years in the business, Ceres is regarded as the
premier certified organic distributor in New Zealand and Australia.
Their product range extends across packaged retail goods, bulk
ingredients and fresh produce and has grown from organic and
bio-dynamic food lines to include environmental cleaning and
personal care products, health & beauty products, books and art
materials.
With 70 plus staff, Ceres sell products direct to consumers via
their Auckland retail outlet and three online stores, and
distribute to organic and health food stores, supermarkets,
wholesalers, manufacturers and co-ops across New Zealand and
Australia.
Growing pains
The growth of Ceres had been impressive, so it wasn't surprising
that its legacy business solutions were failing to keep pace,
especially around the warehousing and inventory management
functionality. An unhappy warehouse operation prompted Ceres to go
to market for a solution, and a meeting with Koorb Consulting
followed. It soon became obvious that although warehousing was a
pressing need, processes throughout the whole company could be
greatly improved.
Amongst the issues highlighted were the legacy inventory system
being used as a retail system, with associated EFTPOS errors.
Opportunities were also identified to in-source production of
business documents like invoices, which were pre-printed and
difficult and expensive to manage, and to introduce tools to assist
with forecasting for procurement planning. An EDI system that
required double entry of every transaction also came in for some
obvious attention.
A healthy delivery of benefits
Koorb proposed an end-to-end solution with Microsoft Dynamics AX
and the Dynamics RMS (Retail Management Solution). Warehouse
scanning, forms printing, and demand forecasting requirements were
delivered using specialist solutions designed for AX (by third
party ISVs). Koorb's consulting team knitted together the overall
integration, eCommerce integration, and a management reporting
dashboard. David Josephson, CFO and general manager of Ceres
Enterprise, has seen huge improvements for the company through the
implementation.
"Our stock accuracy has leapt from 80 percent to 99 percent, and
we now have the ability to manage everything down to a batch,
location and pallet level. With intelligent 'pick, pack and put
away' there is a 100 percent improvement on our dispatch processes.
Dispatch used to be two days from receipt of order, now it's down
to same day or next day at the latest.
"Through the improved forecasting and batch management we've
achieved a 10 percent increase in ordering accuracy and our
overstocking has been reduced by 8-12 percent, and we expect that
to improve further still. This has directly impacted on the
satisfaction of major customers who have experienced the knock on
benefits of continuity of supply. With the greater visibility of
our stock levels we can now sell through old stock at a discount,
whereas before we couldn't - so that's a huge saving for us. Also,
now we can see more accurately what's selling, or not, we can cut
back on some of our imported lines," said Josephson.
The hand held scanners have been immensely popular and quickly
adopted. "The staff love it," said Josephson. "We went live with
scanning on day one as we had very little time to trial it because
of the short implementation program. Everybody wanted to grab a
scanner and get out there and start working. We'd been concerned
about resistance to change, but instead everybody was fighting over
them."
The retail solution at the Ellerslie store now produces 100
percent transaction accuracy and improved customer relations. "RMS
is a true point of sale system with a front screen so that
customers can actually see what's happening during their
transaction and the integration to EFTPOS ensures it is error
free," says Josephson.
Implementing 'Create!form' brought form printing in house,
saving costs and providing flexibility to deliver effective
branding throughout the entire relationship with vendors and
customers.
Josephson sees the role centres as one of the biggest
improvements delivered overall. "The warehouse manager and I being
able to see in real time the number of picker orders outstanding is
invaluable. From first thing in the morning you can actually see if
you're starting to fall behind. For us, customer service is very
important, so having that visibility has helped a huge amount,"
says Josephson.
Overall, company productivity has jumped 20 percent through the
gains in the warehouse. EDI was implemented initially with
Progressive, followed by Foodstuffs and Farmers Trading, and saw
orders being processed in a few minutes rather than the inefficient
double entry process previously required.
In order to optimise inventory levels the executive team at
Ceres required an at-a-glance overview of production, sales and
purchases. Using PerformancePoint in SharePoint Server, Koorb
Consulting provided a dashboard over Sales and Inventory cubes to
highlight the on-hand quantities and values of fast and slow moving
items.
The operations team uses the same Sales and Inventory cubes to
analyse the performance of the different product lines in their
different markets, providing decision support for the re-ordering
process.
Ceres have achieved a high-level of self-service in their
reporting by engaging Koorb for training and to provide on-going
support for their report writing team.
Delivering best practice and best results
Best practice has been a keyword throughout the
implementation.
"We have achieved far more visibility of the business as a
whole, as well as improving specific issues around warehousing.
Whenever you look at the information generated you now can count on
it being accurate and usable. It's very much delivered what Koorb
promised."
|
Quick Facts:
|
| Workstations:
27 concurrent AX users
16 wireless warehouse users
|
Industry: Organic products |
Project Type: ERP Implementation, BI |
| Website:
www.ceres.co.nz
|
Customer Size: 70 staff |
Year: 2010 |
|
Solutions:
MS Dynamics AX2009
MS Dynamics RMS (Retail Management
Solution)
MS SharePoint Server 2010
MS SQL Server 2008
MS Windows Server 2008 R2
MS PerformancePoint Services
RF-Smart for MS Dynamics AX
Create!form for MS Dynamics
AX
Atlas XL - Global Software
Sales Forecasting for MS Dynamics AX
FRx for MS Dynamics
|
Functional areas:
Financials, Supply Chain Management, Advanced Warehouse
Management, Sales Forecasting, Master Planning, Production, Retail
and Business Analysis and Reporting
|
Benefits:
Stock accuracy lept from 80% to 99%
100% improvement in stock pick/pack despatch
Forecasting and batch management 10% increase in ordering
accuracy
Overstocking reduced by 8-12%
Projected 30% increase in business
20% overall increase in efficiencies
100% accuracy in all retail transactions
100% reduction in double handling of orders
|