Strong growth in the semiconductor industry is being driven by demand for microchips in mobile devices, computers, and now vehicles and household appliances. Not only are chip manufacturers growing, but so are the manufacturers who support them. The ability to manage that growth to scale appropriately is key to their success.

One industrial equipment and electronics manufacturer determined that a modern ERP system would significantly improve its business processes and would be critical to help sustain and even improve its market position.

Two decades ago, this company built a custom ERP system. Fast forward to today and the talent that helped develop and support that system is long gone. Additionally, due to its age, the system is outmoded in its functionality. Various modules and applications are not able to integrate with each other and the company acquired a lot of duplicate information as it populated those modules with data. Anything that could not be handled in the custom ERP system had to be created and manipulated with spreadsheets, and workarounds and manual processes were commonplace, creating inefficiencies.

Business Process Improvement Phase Identifies Areas for Improvement

To help modernize their processes and operations, the company engaged an independent ERP consultant team from Ultra Consultants for a multi-phase project including Business Process Improvement, ERP Selection, and ERP Implementation.

The first step was to document their current state and map out a future state in the Business Process Improvement phase. Ultra documented several problems with the legacy ERP system that were inefficient and hindering visibility into data. The system could not conduct end-to-end customer order processing, from a forecast, through a sales order and manufacturing, and finally to fulfillment. The gaps in the process were being plugged with manual workarounds.

Other issues identified with their legacy system include, purchasing and MRP issues, lack of visibility across the business and challenging field service functionality with multiple phone calls and manual steps required just to get repairs made as part of their service business.

Closing the Gaps and Selecting Software

The BPI phase informed Ultra on how to best design demonstration scripts for vendor selection. Streamlined but thorough demo scripts are critical to ensure that the vendors show what their product can offer to support the customer’s requirements.

ERP Vendor selection includes these demo scripts, detailed presentations by the vendors and questions and comments from relevant stakeholders from the customer. In this case, the company wanted to avoid lengthy demonstrations. Ultra was able to accommodate this request by vetting six different vendors and narrowing down the options to three for the final presentations to the customer. With Ultra’s expert guidance they evaluated each vendor using both qualitative and quantitative measures and chose Infor CSI.

Anticipating Increased Efficiency

Implementation of Infor CSI is expected to kick off at the end of May 2020, with go-live planned for the first quarter of 2021.

The company expects to be able to address their customer volume growth by eliminating non-value added work and administrative tasks. With the new ERP from Infor CSI, the company will have more visibility into real-time data. They will be able to avoid manual workarounds and reduce redundancies that will result in improved efficiency and position the company for even more growth as the demand for computer chips continues to surge

To dig a little deeper, view our on-demand webinar for Industrial Equipment Manufacturers: Race to Recovery: Leverage AI for Smarter Forecasting

Download our Comprehensive eBook: What if You Had a “Blueprint” for Your ERP Project?