Gedore

 

Case:

Implementation of an ERP system running on the Microsoft Business Solutions-Navision platform.
Industry: manufacturing of professional tools

 

Brief company profile:

GEDORE (www.gedore.de) is a German industrial corporation and one of the world's largest producers of professional tools. The corporation currently comprises 15 factories: ten factories in Germany, and the other ones in Austria, the UK, France, South Africa and Brazil. The GEDORE range of products exceeds 15,000 product names of professional tools, accessories and industrial furniture. The company manufactures products under such brand names as Rahsol, Dako, Habero, Baldur, Metec, Le Tigre, Torqueleader, Carolus, Klann, and Oksenkopf. Gedore Werkzeuge GmbH is the official representative of the GEDORE corporation in Russia and the CIS countries. The GEDORE warehouse in Moscow is one of the biggest warehouses of professional tools in Russia, with up to 80% of the GEDORE product range permanently available. The number of GEDORE customers exceeds 1000. The company ships up to 80 orders spanning a wide variety of products every day. Weekly product supplies from Germany encompass approximately 1000 product names. Gedore Werkzeuge GmbH is also the general representative in Russia of a number of well known German manufacturers of products for professional use, including Wiha, Endres, Rhodius, and B&W.

 

The Client's objectives:

An ever growing customer base, rising sales, and an expanding product range are all unalienable features of a growing company. Apart from meeting the current customer demand, a growing company must always have ample spare resources to be able to keep pace with customer demand growth. For Gedore Werkzeuge the most critical bottleneck in business development was its information system, which had very limited functionality and resources. The information system had to be urgently replaced as business processes were supported by two unintegrated applications, 1S and Infin. 1S supported sales and purchases, whereas Infin was used for bookkeeping. Operations were complicated by the need to mirror sales and payments data into Infin and to verify data stored in the two systems. Besides that, 1S did not cope with the huge data flow, which led to customer order processing delays.

 

The solution:

Partner Power Russia won the Gedore Werkzeuge tender in which 8 Microsoft Business Solutions partners participated and was selected as the Microsoft Navision implementation consultant.

Russian and western ERP systems available in the market were analyzed with a focus on their functionality to manage sales, requirements planning and product purchases. Microsoft Navision was selected because this system has broad standard functionality in those critical areas and in-built tools to expand the functionality further. This was the best for the current requirements and offered good expandability.

The project started in late December 2001, and commercial operation of the main modules started as early as May 2002.

 


Project results:

As the result of the project the company was able to reach good qualitative and quantitative results in logistics and customer care. Besides that, the project improved the overall business organization of the company by better segregating the responsibilities of the sales, logistics, bookkeeping departments and the warehouse.

 

1. Improved quality of sales and customer care.

While preparing a commercial offer a sales manager has all the information on the customer's payments and amounts due and/or payable by/to the customer and is therefore able to tell the customer precisely when delivery can be expected. The approved commercial offer is passed to the customer service department which reserves the goods for the customer. The system provides customer service employees with the order payment method information, the current amount due and/or payable from/to the customer, tells how many items are available and ready for shipment, etc. It is no longer required to register customer payment transactions twice as now all payments are entered only by the accounting department.

In another major step to improve customer care, a procedure was designed for changing reservations of goods, including canceling reservation of goods items with expired reservation periods, creating the "order queue" depending on the times of placing orders and payments, etc. The results of the reservation change procedure are displayed as reservation status changes. The same mechanism is used following receipt of goods at the warehouse.

 

2. Streamlined procurement.

The logistics department is now able to respond promptly to changes in demand for specific goods. ABC analysis is used to assess goods turnover and to determine the procurement policy. In procurement planning, the system calculates the required amounts according to such parameters as classification, the reserve stock, the approved requirements to fulfill sales orders, the amount of goods ordered previously, the amount of goods in transit, the recommended amount of order, and the expected time of order execution by the vendor.

The new system offers recommendations that can be used in creating orders to the vendor in addition to the personnel's own experience. Now it is always easy to see requirements behind a particular order. Now the system automatically creates orders that previously had to be registered manually and indicates the sale order that the procurement order is required for. Now extra time is available to analyze and streamline the turnover of goods.

 

3. Streamlined warehouse operations.

The new system has streamlined warehouse personnel activities and ruled out the possibility of shipment documents bearing the same number but differing details. Now all shipment documents are created after shipments have been assembled in the warehouse and after shipment compositions have been checked by the customer.

 

4. Less complicated accounting.

The common information environment makes it no longer necessary for the accounting personnel to make account entries for all documents related to sales, procurements and goods movements at warehouses, or to collate data between the two systems.

 

 

 

You have a project ? contact us ...