Munster Simms improves responsiveness by ERP upgrade

Browser-based, real-time information access across all departments is making a difference for £10 million caravan and boat equipment manufacturer Munster Simms, in cutting costs and improving customer responsiveness in production. The company recently upgraded its Mapics iSeries (AS/400) enterprise system to v6.0 to get the functionality first at its Bangor, Northern Ireland factory, and is now rolling it out to its operations in Massachusetts, USA via a VPN (virtual private network). Wesley Hanson, Munster Simms’ finance director, says he wanted better response time to customer orders, while maintaining reliability in manufacturing management across its 1,500 product lines, which range from low voltage pumps to water filters. “With growing pressure to deliver more products faster at lower cost, we needed to get at key manufacturing information more quickly and easily,” he says. Having reviewed the ERP market, he believes Mapics still offers the opportunity to scale up and provide the foundation for extensions into automated supply chain operations and CRM (customer relationship management) for the firm’s future. He says users of the new system can now get at the information they need quickly throughout the business. Users across production, purchasing, stock control, sales and the rest are all building their own reports without help from IT, and Hanson says this has been essential in reacting more quickly to what are for him fast-moving markets. “The existing system contained all the necessary information on inventory, products, customer orders, MRP, purchasing, etcetera. By making this more accessible we could make the whole enterprise run more efficiently,” he says. “In our business, everything needed to build the products that customers want, must arrive in the assembly shop at exactly the right time. To achieve this, everyone in the organisation must have the right information.” This is Mapics 15th success in Ireland, which works with Open Business Solutions.