It was the middle of the night when the jangling phone
interrupted the sleep of Stuart McNall, Founder and Chief
Operations Officer for FUSION Electronics in New Zealand. The call
was from his regional sales manager in the United Kingdom, who
reported that a shipment of car audio systems hadn't arrived as
promised. The biggest part of the problem? A huge retailer in the
United Kingdom was widely promoting that particular system and
needed the physical goods to sell to customers.
There had been a delay at the FUSION factory in
China, an event that naturally had a trickledown effect on the
shipping schedule. But such were the company's systems that each
region operated with its own isolated set of information. The
United Kingdom regional sales manager never got word of the
change.
For a small company, it's a matter of picking up the
phone to keep everyone in the know; that was the way things worked
in the past at FUSION. But the company had been enjoying
unparalleled growth for a few years-it was now time for its
processes and information sharing capabilities to grow up, too.
"It was a significant challenge to operate an
increasingly complex, multi-country, multicurrency organization
with separate inventory locations," recalls McNall. "Everyone
managed their portion of the business using spread-sheets that may
or may not have been accurate because they were not linked to any
system. We suffered because we couldn't trust the integrity of the
data we all worked from."
As FUSION grew, its supply chain became more
complicated, and its existing logistics application just couldn't
keep up. Stock was in the wrong warehouses around the globe,
requiring the time, staff effort, and expense of transferring the
products to the right locations. "We incurred increased costs while
also slowing down our time-to-market," notes McNall.
Because the company's financial systems also were separated by
region, handling international transactions-even just within the
company-was difficult. "The lack of flexibility in our
cross-company billing was a key issue because it made everything
convoluted and resulted in a lot of manual rework," says McNall.
"We left ourselves open to human errors that we couldn't always
catch."
Expanding the potential for growth
It was time for McNall to banish siloed information and move to
an environment in which he and his regional managers would have
full visibility into all facets of FUSION. "I was focusing too much
on getting our day-to-day numbers right and not enough on strategic
long-term planning," says McNall.
"We needed centralised sales, warehousing, and stock information
and shared access to it, along with the ability to audit, manage
inventory, and forecast so that we could continue to grow, without
any corresponding pain."
Transparency would give everyone a comprehensive understanding
as to what products were where, when they were being delivered, how
many were arriving, and when they could sell which products-all of
which could have a real impact on the business.
Removing accounting headaches
Now that it has a system capable of supporting its cross-company
needs, FUSION has successfully integrated, streamlined, and
automated its accounting processes end-to-end to eliminate re-entry
of sales and purchase order data, thereby reducing the chance for
human error and improving the accuracy and integrity of
system-housed information.
"We're working with our system as opposed to working around it,"
says McNall. "I now can give my global team the flexibility to be
able to ship goods quickly to their destinations from any one of
our three distribution centers, regardless of where the deal was
signed. For example, we can arrange from New Zealand to send
products to Russia while still being able to dispatch the stock
from our United Kingdom warehouse."
McNall is in the process of using the new solution to solve its
issues with intercompany financial transactions. "Now, moving
products among our different locations won't result in accounting
headaches," says McNall. "I don't have to worry about currency
exchange rates, retyping of invoices, or anything else. We've
removed the duplication of entries; we now enter the data once, and
the intercompany transactions are taken care of, thus providing
confidence in the integrity of the data."
Making real-world decisions in real time
McNall and his managers worldwide now all benefit from the
ability to quickly and easily extract accurate, real-time data on
an as needed basis from one central data repository.
"Before, I had trouble just locating data, but now I can quickly
drill down to the desired information," he says. "We can produce
country-by-country reports on business performance that take into
account market complexities such as changing exchange rates-we've
never been able to do that before."
What's more, having visibility will help FUSION avoid situations
like the one in the United Kingdom. "Shared access to companywide
process, status, and inventory information helps us set customer
expectations more accurately," says McNall.
That sort of positive communication with customers will help
drive business growth. FUSION now can expand to new countries
without creating new silos of information. Says McNall, "It's a
relief for me to know that we can expand to new countries without
generating additional, separate systems. Now our data is entered
one place, one time, and everyone can use it right away." That
means that McNall can rest easy-with no more late-night calls.
Instead, he'll wake up refreshed, ready to share FUSION Electronics
with the world.
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Quick Facts:
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Workstations: 11
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Industry: Technology
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Project Type: ERP implementation
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Website:
www.fusionelectronics.com
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Customer Size: Medium
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Year: 2007
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Solutions:
MS Dynamics AX
2009
MS Windows Server
MS SQL Server 2008
MS SQL
Reporting Servers
MS SQL Analysis
Servers
MS Dynamics FRx Reporter
Atlas XL - Globe Software
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Functional areas:
Financials, Fixed Assets, Trade, Logistics, Master Planning,
Production and Business Analysis
Scenario:
Enterprise Resource Planning, Financial reporting, Business
analysis, Export documentation
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Benefits:
Fully integrated, streamlined and automated accounting
processes
Eliminated data re-entry
Improved accuracy and integrity of information
Able to extract accurate, real-time data
One version of the truth
Countrywide visability
Intercompany transactions
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