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System
Label
1 . Overview
Roscommon based System Label (www.systemlabel.com)
is a specialist printer of industrial labels for multinational
manufacturers in the electronics, automotive and medical
sectors. A wholly owned subsidiary of German company
Bischoff GmbH, System Label has been in Ireland since
1992 and has grown to a staff of 45.
The business for System Label in Ireland was generated
from two sources. A large portion of orders was related
to clients of the parent company in Germany - Daimler
Chrysler, Siemens, and Bosch to name a few. These
orders were processed through the German plant but
production happened in Roscommon. The balance was
generated through sales and marketing activity originating
in Ireland. Primarily, these companies would be large
multinationals and indigenous manufacturers of electrical
and medical equipment based in Ireland and the UK.
System Label had been building up its internal IT
system for a number of years prior to the implementation
of the two new modules – raw materials management
and Data Integration – the focus of this case.
By 1999, various modules had been added allowing the
system to handle:
- Orders
- Basic
stock control of raw materials (in each plant)
- Delivery
notes
- Invoicing
- Stock
control of finished goods
- Quotations
The biggest
problem faced by the team was that of Data Integration. There were advantages
to having two plants but, by linking the two systems the company could
start to address some of the disadvantages.
Until the project was initiated, the transfer between systems had been
done manually via fax. Each week, the two sites would exchange a number
of faxes:
- Planned
deliveries and shipments information going one way and;
- Orders
to be produced, stock levels and raw materials transfers going the other
way.
There were
a number of issues with this process:
- Untimely
–
The transfers of data were happening on a weekly basis and the information
was out of date the minute it was transferred.
- Time
consuming –
The printing, faxing and re-keying of data was a monotonous and time
consuming task.
- Error
prone –
Regardless of quality of staff, manual systems were always prone to
errors.
By 2000,
identical systems were running in both Ireland and Germany and the transfer
of data between the two systems was being done by a combination of faxing
and re-keying.
The real value-add would come when the two systems were linked together
electronically, thus negating the need for any manual intervention in
the transfer of data. Additionally, the lack of a raw materials management
system meant that no member of staff in Ireland could see what raw materials
were available in Germany (or vice versa). Additionally, this stock system
wasn’t tied into the order system and thus raw materials couldn’t
be reserved for a
particular job.
This new functionality was created in Microsoft Access, the package that
System Label had used to develop its system to date. An Internet transfer
was used to transmit the data from one plant to the other – this
was done on a daily basis.
Interestingly,
and in direct contrast to many of the organisations taking advantage of
the eBusiness Accelerator Fund, System Label chose to build a bespoke
system to meet the company’s needs. The choice to use a bespoke system
over an off-the-shelf package was down to availability of packages that
would suit the company’s requirements - at the time of development
there were no such packages and the company would have been left with
a solution that only partly met its needs.
By the time development was complete, System Label had spent around double
what was originally anticipated. Given that the new system was going to
offer far more than was originally anticipated, the company wasn’t
disheartened by this overspend.
Benefits of the new system for customers included:
- Faster
response times
- Increased
capacity of production
- Lower
cost
Benefits
for System Label included:
- Better
efficiency
- Reduced
cost threshold
- Improved
utilisation of raw material
- Better
utilised capacity
- Reduced
data entry
- Better
Disaster recovery in the case of accident
Over the
past 10 years and, in particular, in the last 24 months, System label
has learnt many lessons:
- Small
companies can use technology to their advantage
- It’s
vitally important to delegate
- Use senior
people – carefully!
- Have strategic
vision and roadmap
Now that
System label has a solid back-end system, it will be reasonably straightforward
for the company to add functionality in the future. The pace at, and order
in which, this functionality is implemented will be determined by market
forces and internal resources. New functionality to be added in the future
includes:
- A customer
extranet module
- Online
ordering
- Job tracking
- Integration
with System Label’s financial accounting package
- Move to
SQL
- More frequent
system transfers
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