TYE Manufacturing Limited (TYE)

Motivation: To become more competitive, having access and leverage to tools that differentiated customer service and technical support through improved response times to customers’ requests - especially within the engineering departments, allowing for on the spot changes or modifications during a production run

Innovation: A solution that allowed for better management and planning of large and complicated projects with complex production processes – while having access to real time reporting systems that quickly measured both project performance and departmental performance simultaneously

Solution: Microsoft Dynamics SL (formerly MBS Solomon)

Already a leading player in the Caribbean market, TYE's customer base was continuing to grow to include wholesale purchasers from across the Caribbean as well as Canada and Latin America. Despite heavy investments in upgrading its plant, equipment and human resource capacity, TYE’s Managing Director, Robert Tang Yuk felt there were still opportunities to improve their competitiveness by improving on process management and inventory planning.

For TYE Manufacturing, an IT system that solved the problem of fast access to management information and reporting, accurate cost estimates, more efficient supply-chain management while supporting the demanding needs of the manufacturing process was the final block in the puzzle that would help them achieve a globally competitive and responsive operation that focused on the needs of their customer base.

The solution offered a lower cost of ownership by not requiring full time IT personnel to oversee the system. As most medium sized enterprises, TYE did not have the resources to maintain IT staffing. As far as they were concerned they were a manufacturing operation, not an IT operation.

"This therefore precluded a vendor with an install, train and walk away approach," said Tang Yuk, Managing Director - TYE Manufacturing Company Limited. It placed significant importance and emphasis on systems implementation, strong project management capabilities, customised training and knowledge transfer.

The IT upgrade offered a phased and flexible implementation approach that allowed for realisable gains to be achieved even without the entire system being implemented.

"We were seeking to establish a strong, flexible yet easy to use foundation, which would allow customers to have direct access to our system to place orders directly and for stocks to be replenished automatically. A key requirement was to ensure that the chosen system was able to fully support TYE's current and future requirements, above and beyond the capabilities of our current technological environment," Tang Yuk added.

The success of Infotech Caribbean's implementation of Microsoft's Solomon, (now re-branded MS Dynamics SL) enterprise application at TYE Manufacturing was evident by the improvement in margins and profitability, inventory categorisation and rationalisation.

There was also better than expected user acceptance, which led to an efficient rollout across the entire organisation. Key departments such as Accounts, Sales, Warehousing, Management, Stores, Engineering and Purchasing saw measurable improvements in efficiency, customer response and management reporting.

"The phased implementation approach of the Accounting and Financial Modules, followed by the Inventory Module allowed us to realise tremendous financial and operational improvements, even when additional modules were being rolled out. You can see the difference along the operations process, as our inventory management system is fully optimised," Tank Yuk further added.

"We were able to realise tremendous financial and operational gains without an in-house Systems Administrator for two years during the implementation process. We leveraged Infotech's Help Desk Support Services for troubleshooting and we received timely resolution across the entire technology stack," added Tang Yuk.

Prior to the implementation of MS Dynamics SL, custom jobs were handled by a manual process resulting in delays in job costing, inaccurate costing methods and customer service delays in preparation of custom job quotes. With the implementation of MS Dynamics SL, TYE Manufacturing has been better equipped to proactively cost their custom, high yielding jobs more reliably and able to realise a 15% increase in margin contributions from their core system upgrade.

These are sizable and measurable gains and having easy access to the technology also allows TYE to compare strategies, having faster and more accurate information available for quick business decision making.

TYE Manufacturing was able to leverage Microsoft Dynamics SL’s re-stocking functionality to lower the cost of raw inputs and realise a 15% increase in margins. Even in a highly commoditised market, this margin contribution is on par with that of custom jobs, a benefit, which would have not otherwise been realised.

The ability to rationalise the product line, schedule production runs more efficiently and manage warehousing to optimise manufacturing equipment has reduced idle time and wastage.

This has allowed TYE to increase margins and profitability from the core, 'bread & butter business' so more resources are now available to focus on delivering a high quality customer experience!