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Multis
Group
3 . Problem Definition and Objectives
Unlike many SMEs who took advantage of the Enterprise Ireland eBusiness
Accelerator Fund, rather than simply putting new technology in place,
Multis chose to look at the company as a whole and then identify what
needed to be done to ensure the ongoing growth and stability of the organisation.
This strategy looked at a number of areas:
- Reviewing
the company’s business plan and identifying
the company direction
- Identifying
the demands of customers
- Identifying
where the market was heading
- Identifying
the organisation’s requirements from an operational
perspective
From this
investigation, a list of business requirements was developed and the management
team then identified the best ways to fulfil those requirements. One of
the elements within this list was the organisation’s business system.
Effectively, Multis needed to replace its internal systems in order to
consolidate its current business and facilitate future growth.
The current business system was purchased back in 1994 when Multis was
in ‘start-up mode’ (it was upgraded in 1997) – it suited
the company’s needs perfectly and was used on both the Irish and
Dutch sites. In addition each plant had its own infrastructure for Business
System, email and Internet access. After six years of usage with just
one upgrade, the current system was becoming unsuitable for the company’s
current business model. It didn’t
provide all the functionality required by Multis, particularly on sales
order processing – this functionality was a bespoke addition and
was not fully integrated to the system.
Additionally, a lot of the interaction with customers was incredibly resource
intensive for Multis – orders and queries from OEMs required a team
of customer service staff. As the level of business was growing, this
level of manual interaction wasn’t an option – the levels of
staff required (and the associated cost of those staff) would have inhibited
the future growth of the company.
Issues with inventory reporting
The fact that there were independent systems in each plant that were only
consolidated on a daily basis created many difficulties. Data was often
up to 24 hours old and two systems needed to be checked to see if a piece
of equipment was available for sale. Daily reporting of stock availability
to the customer base was time consuming and required manual intervention.
Data was taken from both stock systems and manually consolidated before
being distributed to customers. While this report was being prepared nobody
could process any transactions on the system. Other reporting generated
by the system had first to be exported to Excel and then edited before
being forwarded out to customers and OEMs.
As part of the strategic consultation process, a number of objectives
for a business system were identified:
- Provision
of an end-to-end solution – The business system
needed to support end-to-end supply chain connectivity
- looking at the process of stock movement from
point of purchase, to arrival at Multis, re-manufacture,
sales, delivery and invoicing.
- Ability
to interact with business partners automatically
– By providing an online system, Multis could
provide a better service to customers and OEMs.
- Better
access to information – Multis’ customer
base had a large requirement for information and
required access to that information on an as-needed,
self-service basis, without ongoing input from the
teams within Multis.
- Provision
of online transactions – Multis wanted to provide customers with
the ability to transact online.
It was these
objectives for the business system that brought the Multis team to the
conclusion that the current business system would not suit the organisation’s
requirements in the long term. Multis required a fully integrated business
system that would allow all transactions to be completed on-line.
There were two ways in which these objectives could have been achieved:
- Stay
with the current system, upgraded to include an
order processing system or
- Replace
the current system with an entirely new package
It became
pretty obvious early on in the process that a new business system was
required. A lot of the functionality that would be required in future
was unavailable in the current system and it was operating near to full
capacity.
It is important to note that this decision wasn’t predetermined at
the start of the review, but was made as a result of it.
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