Case Study: ERP implementation

The Client

The client has one of the largest consumer goods businesses in Vietnam. It is a manufacturer of leading brands in foods, home and personal care. They have deep roots in many provinces with many distributors across the country.

Requirements

To optimize its supply chain, which was crucial to its success and continued growth, the company decided to remodel its supply chain by setting up a distribution management system (DMS). This program aimed at reducing management efforts for paying attention those works as well as collecting sale, inventory data then transferring to a central database at headquarters. The data would be used to forecast future sales and manufacture.

From a technological point of view, this required seamless integration of legacy systems and packaged solutions to form an entirely new layer of supply chain systems.

Duration: 11 months

Challenges

The key to success for implementing an ERP system is gaining a deep insight into the company’s business processes and information systems. The diverse technology platforms of the client coupled with the fact that ERP is not a technology one can implement right out of the box meant we had numerous challenges.

We set up the client’s DMS based on the Solomon package software that includes many features to manage activities of a medium-size company such as Accounting, Inventory, Purchase Order and Sale Order

The team also developed the Palm Order Entry application in order to reduce the salesmen’s paperwork and also to reduce the accountant’s required data input. The system allows salesmen to create a sales order in Palm which can then be imported to the DMS system by Palm’s synchronizing mechanism..

Solutions

We worked on business process definition, program management, project management, package evaluation, package implementation, key user training, and post-production support.

A team of 21 FPT Software experts decided on the methodology and approach to implement the MS Solomon 4.5 to achieve process efficiency. The team used Solomon solutions to streamline the manufacturing, distribution, procurement and financial accounting processes of the client. These were integrated with Crystal Report 8.0, a forecasting and planning tool. MS SQL Server 2000, an enterprise-wide data model was used to store all data.

Technologies Used: Solomon IV 4.5, SQL Server 2000, VB 6.0, CodeWarrior 5.0, Visual SourceSafe, Palm OS 4.0, Dameware.

Benefits to Customer

The implementation has imparted high visibility to the supply chain and improved demand planning and execution.

The completion of the project simplifies access to information in MS Solomon database. Users can enter and approve requests from any location; look up inventory item availability; and provide customers and vendors with the access they need to view specific information within the system – all from a Web browser.

Reports have been conducted instantly based on actual data, and weekly reports have been completed in a fraction of the time previously needed, and the accuracy of forecast has been improved considerably.