Customers reap gains of ERP implementation
PETALING JAYA—Malaysian manufacturer Dunham-Bush Holdings has implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for the first time in its history, in a bid to improve its manufacturing efficiency and lower operating costs.
Vlad Safyanovskiy, executive director of information management and decision support at Dunham-Bush Holdings, said the company chose Oracle's JD Edwards (JDE) EnterpriseOne 8.12 to create a fully integrated IT infrastructure for its sales and production platform.
"We chose JDE due to a projected lower total cost of ownership," he said at the signing ceremony with Oracle here Wednesday. "It's still early days for us but we have seen up to 40 percent of savings on inventory returns since implementing the system."
Dunham-Bush is a manufacturer and distributor of a complete heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system and is based in Kajang, 50km south of Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur.
Prior to its investment in JDE EnterpriseOne, Safyanovskiy explained that Dunham-Bush had never before invested in an ERP system to streamline its business and had merely depended on physical documents moving across various departments as a means of coordinating its workflow.
He also noted that the company faced what is known as "islands of information"-- different departments having their own database of information and where systems could not communicate with one another.
"For example, there was virtually no communication between the engineering and costing departments," Safyanovskiy told ZDNet Asia on the sidelines of the media briefing. "Because of this, we weren't efficient and were wasting a lot of time and resources."
By implementing JDE EnterpriseOne since August 2008, Safyanovskiy said the company was able to improve communications and streamline business processes and auditing throughout the organization by reducing errors and increasing the speed of information through automation.
It was able to improve its sales inquiry response time, especially when receiving non-standard sales inquiries, as well as streamline the interaction between its engineering, production and sales departments to improve customer response time, he added.
Safyanovskiy noted that Dunham-Bush began evaluating as many as 50 ERP solutions back in April, 2008. After extensive investigations, the company shortlisted three vendors--SAP, Epicor and Oracle--as its technology vendor, but finally settled on Oracle's JDE after extensive trials with Oracle, he added.
"We found JDE's fully Web-based interface a convenient solution and our staff also found JDE easy to use," he explained. "Moreover, JDE had flexibility to support future growth and robust industry-specific functionality."
Asked if Dunham-Bush was planning to implement other ERP modules, Safyanovskiy said: "We plan to look next at customer relationship management (CRM), then product lifecycle management (PLM) and finally business intelligence (BI) by year-end."
Oracle managing director K. Raman said its products are helping Malaysian global players compete successfully in the demanding and cost-conscious industries.
"With Oracle's JDE EnterpriseOne, Dunham-Bush can deliver something extra to their customers by offering them a faster turnaround time for orders while also benefiting from internal improvements."
Edwin Yapp is is a freelance IT writer based in Malaysia.