Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Engineering Company Gains Competitive Advantage
Reduces Complexity and Improves Decision Making
Overview
Country or Region: India
Industry: Engineering
Customer Profile
Pooja Forge Limited manufactures a wide array of precision cold-forged high tensile fasteners and components of various grades of carbon, alloy, and stainless steel for automobile, electronics, and construction industries.
Business Situation
The key issue across the company was the lack of control because of the lack of available information, be it on the shop floor or in the financial group.
Solution
Trident Information Systems, a Microsoft® Certified Partner implemented Microsoft Business Solutions–Navision® to deliver greater visibility into business activities through improved access to information.
Benefits
n Better product quality achieved
n Financial control improves cash flow
n Easy to track inventory
n Control and visibility over shop floor
n Data backup made easy
n Easily generated reports / “Our decision was made in favor of Microsoft Navision primarily because we felt that it was simplest solution to implement, customize, and use,”
Manish Aggarwal, Managing Director, Pooja Forge Limited.
Pooja Forge Limited, a leading Indian manufacturer and exporter of industrial fasteners, wanted to upgrade its IT infrastructure to meet its goals of growing the business by 40 percent each year. To achieve this, the company needed to remove redundancies from the business processes. It also required better visibility into the company's business functions and to make information readily accessible to its employees.
Pooja Forge deployed Microsoft® Business Solutions–Navision® across the organization.
Though the new system has been in use since July 2005, Pooja Forge has already seen some significant benefits. Better access to necessary data has led to better control over production and finances. And most importantly, it can track production through the supply chain which helps maintain high product quality and reduces inventory carrying costs.
Situation
Located at Faridabad, Haryana (India), Pooja Forge Limited was founded by Mr. Jagdish Aggarwal in 1977 as Perfect Fasteners Private Limited to manufacture self tapping and machine screws. The company was renamed Pooja Forge Private Limited in 1987 when it diversified into the commercial production of cold-forged precision high tensile fasteners, such as screws, bolts, and nuts.
Today, Pooja Forge Limited is one of the leaders in the industrial fastener segment in India. It manufactures the widest range of precision low and high-tensile fasteners of carbon, alloy, and stainless steels for various industries, including automobile, electric, electronics, and construction. The company’s sales revenues have grown from U.S.$800,000 in 1988-89 to U.S.$ 24 million in 2004-05 (INR 105 crore).
Pooja Forge's business was supported by a custom-built application running on FoxBASE. There was a need to integrate the data from various sources—such as from the shop floor and the warehouses—and make that consolidated information available at the head office. But this was not possible, since the application could not support data updates from multiple locations.
The second major problem was the number times the same data was entered into different applications at various stages of production, inventory management, and sales. The manual errors could create a number of challenges, such as discrepancies in data leading to problems in reconciliation. This was because FoxPro did not provide a relational database where centralized master data could be maintained.
The third key challenge was that the company employed a manual process to manage the production cycle. This led to delays due to the lack of production information, the over-production of product at times, and related inventory issues. This often increased the cost of production as well as inventory carrying costs.
Finally, the employees’ and management's dependency on the IT team for all information needs created significant problems. Each time some piece of data was required, the IT team would have to write a small program to pull the data out of the FoxBASE database. This work could take from two days to a week to create basic reports such as ledgers and sales revenues.
While the company kept its employees abreast of the latest technologies to induce new product realization techniques, Pooja Forge executives felt that it was time to upgrade its internal technology infrastructure as well, to meet its target of 40 percent annual growth.
Solution
Once Pooja Forge executives made the decision to upgrade the company's IT infrastructure, various vendors of enterprise resource planning systems were invited to submit proposals. Pooja Forge IT staff set about evaluating available solutions. The company looked at a range of solutions, ranging from BaaN to local Indian solution providers such as HotBiz.
Pooja Forge management finally decided to implement Microsoft® Business Solutions–Navision® software. “Our decision was made in favor of Microsoft Navision, primarily because we felt that it was the simplest solution to implement, customize, and use,” explains Manish Aggarwal, Managing Director, Pooja Forge Limited.
Trident Information Systems, a Microsoft Certified Partner, implemented all modules of Microsoft Business Solutions–Navision, including manufacturing, quality control, and jobs module in a single-phased project, which concluded in just seven months.
One quarter of the project efforts involved customization, some of which was critical for the business. For example in the job module, Trident customized the item tracking functionality to meet the organization's needs. Trident also created a module to manage the inventory lying with the transporters, which would typically vendors.
“Trident has done a good job in the implementation, meeting our schedules and customization requirements on time and on target,” comments Vivek Bhatnagar, Manager - IT, Pooja Forge Limited.
Benefits
Pooja Forge met its objectives with the successful implementation of Microsoft® Business Solutions – Navision® software. The company has been able to streamline operations, reducing operational costs, save time and money and improve quality with the implementation.
Better Quality
One of the fundamental tenets of Pooja Forge as a company is the importance of quality in all aspects of the business. With the implementation of Microsoft Business Solutions–Navision, the company has been able to improve processes and quality on the shop floor, in the boardroom, and in every other aspect of the business.
Better Financial Control Improves Cash Flow
The biggest issue that the company faced while managing its financial information was recording two kinds of payments—payments the company received from its customers and payments made, for example, to vendors. Often the sales and finance team did not follow up on payments due, because the information on outstanding payments was not readily available internally. “With financial information available at all times, reminders are sent for outstanding payments and the cash flow cycles have begun to improve,” comments Manish Aggarwal, Managing Director, Pooja Forge Limited.
Better Control and Visibility over Shop Floor
Before implementing Microsoft Business Solutions–Navision, Pooja Forge supervisors did not have a way to manage processes on the shop floor. They simply managed what they could see. The key issue was that the management could not track production and the cost of production per lot. Therefore, there was limited control and sometimes poor decision making due to the lack of information.
Microsoft Navision has given the management insight into all the activities on the shop floor. The new system ensures that daily production numbers and the cost of production are available at the end of each work day.
Easy to Track Inventory through the Supply Chain
Pooja Forge wanted to ensure that production and inventory carrying costs did not balloon due to poor planning and decision making. Microsoft Navision has come in very handy on this front. “We can now track a lot from each stage at the shop floor to the warehouses and into the distribution network, with the help of Microsoft Navision. This enables us to keep our costs low and improves our profit margins,” explains Vivek Bhatnagar, Manager-IT, Pooja Forge Limited.
Data Backup Made Easy
The data backup was a big problem and Pooja Forge faced several instances where it lost information due to poorly executed backups and other outages. Now with the scheduled backup features on Microsoft Navision, the backups are no longer a problem area.
Reports Generated without Help of IT Staff
The biggest boon has been access to data at any time. The company's management can get snapshots of data without waiting for days spent on compilation. What’s more, there is no need for the IT administrator to write code to generate the reports, nor is there a likelihood of errors because of manual processes.
About Trident Information Systems Private Limited
Trident Information Systems Private Limited established in 1997 offers a broad portfolio of high quality, contemporary and cost effective software development and IT consulting services to its customers.
Trident offers a complete range of software and consulting services such as technology consulting, Internet and e-business consulting, system integration, and custom application development.
Microsoft Business Solutions
Microsoft Business Solutions offer integrated business applications and services that allow small and midsize organizations and divisions of large enterprises to connect employees, customers, and suppliers for improved efficiency. The financial management, customer relationship management, supply chain management, and analytics applications work with other Microsoft software, including the Microsoft Office System and the Microsoft Windows® operating system, to streamline processes across an entire organization. This gives businesses insight to respond rapidly, plan strategically, and execute quickly. Microsoft Business Solutions are delivered through a worldwide network of channel partners that provide specialized services and local support tailored to a company’s needs.
For more information about Microsoft Business Solutions, go to:
www.microsoft.com/businesssolutions