Fuji Xerox Australia goes for Asia-Pacific visibility on £830,000 Geac project

Full stock visibility across Fuji Xerox’s Australia, New Zealand and Singapore operations, resulting in better forecasting and stock utilisation, as well as improved and standardised business processes are the expected returns from an £830,000 supply chain integration project won with the company by Geac. The project, which is due to go live in the spring of next year, involves a distribution hub on a 900-user Geac System 21 ERP package in Sydney, also supporting manufacturing and service, and an Oracle-based supply chain management suite used by the parent company in Singapore. Says Rohan Higgins, Fuji Xerox Australia’s project manager, “The project will effectively provide us with an Asia-Pacific view of our business, instead of trying to balance local demand and supply. Having access to a larger supply chain, by linking systems together, will vastly enhance stock visibility. This in turn will enable stock movement planning between hubs rather than ad-hoc ordering. “By early next year we’ll have a fully automated system which will eliminate any non value-added components and tasks, improve our asset management and process productivity.” Fuji Xerox in Australia has been using System 21 for around three years during which time it’s seen considerable ongoing business improvement. “Projects have included the linking of over 450 service engineers to System 21, the development of equipment meter-billing processes, and the integration of CRM (customer relationship management), dealer-management and other service solutions,” says Dominic O’Hanlon, Geac general manager. The two have already been working together to install the new application and hardware, including implementing an upgrade to an IBM iSeries 820 (AS/400). That’s been sized to accommodate the existing operations and the new project and, says the firm, future potential projects as well, harnessing its dynamic logical partitioning (LPAR) technology. Interestingly, the firm also says LPAR will enable it to divide the processing power of the server to provide managed availability, whereby one partition can be used as a back-up and brought on-line if the other fails, or is down for scheduled maintenance. Says Alex Pantazis, Fuji Xerox information services manager: “Having attended a recent Geac customer conference I was impressed at the level of R&D being invested into System 21. The current release and the launch next year of ‘Aurora’ will deliver business and process improvements for organisations through the use of its web enabled applications. “Over the next few months we will undertake a feasibility study to determine the benefits of upgrading to this release in the future.”