Powering New Growth
Continued
Meanwhile, BREG leveraged a centralized database of business data to get a real-time handle on the business. Managers now know precisely how much inventory they have throughout the United States, Mexico, and Europe, and how many products they are shipping each day. "We're not making mistakes on the front end when we make commitments to our customers," enthuses Romeo. "That's a real strategic advantage for us in the medical device market, where companies are not distinguished by products alone but by their servicing capabilities."
Romeo cites his firm's mobile supply chain functionality, warehouse management system, and demand planning software as examples of how technology has given them a competitive edge and allowed them to gracefully scale the business. "Oracle E-Business Suite has been an extraordinarily powerful solution for us," he sums up. "We now understand customer needs and can set the right direction for the future."
Today, about 550 BREG employees are users of the Oracle software, and 25 people are managing its information systems. They are using the Oracle applications in conjunction with Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Real Application Clusters in a Linux environment. "Linux surpassed our expectations," notes Romeo. "It gives us 24/7 capability with minimal maintenance. We've been able to keep our hardware investments to a minimum, and we can easily add processors to our database cluster."
HOPPE's revenue exceeds €300 million, and the company has a more-consistent, cost-effective set of business practices across its factories and distribution centers in Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, as well as in the United States. Mayr says its Oracle system enables the company to react quickly to customer requests. The system coordinates financial, logistics, and manufacturing processes to drive operational efficiency, and it supports multiple currencies to simplify accounting practices. Although the implementation took more time and money than he expected, Mayr says the system paid for itself in three years by reducing costs throughout the company. "We now have higher planning quality, better coordination, and better financials, with profitability by part number, by customer, by month, and so forth," he says. "Information helps us run our company much better than we were ever able to do before."
Industry Focus
According to Oracle's Keever, Oracle Accelerate has been optimized for a wide range of industries, from aerospace and defense to consumer products. Because Oracle understands the business process flows of these industries, customers are free to focus on running their businesses instead of on how to make information systems work together. This is precisely what motivated Hunter Douglas to adopt Oracle applications for its Australian operations. Hunter Douglas is a manufacturer and distributor of window furnishings and architectural products. The company has manufacturing and assembly plants in Sydney and Adelaide, and sales offices in Brisbane, Hobart, Melbourne, and Perth.
Hunter Douglas' enterprise software journey began in the late 1990s when IT pros began to confront Y2K issues. Management wanted to take the opportunity not only to fix potential problems caused by the date fields in their legacy information systems, but to deploy modern software applications that would improve the business going forward. Hunter Douglas also wanted to create more-efficient order entry and inventory control procedures for its high-growth product lines.
After reviewing the available business applications, Hunter Douglas decided to implement JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and JD Edwards World applications. The linchpin of the new system, they decided, would be a centralized sales order system that could help the company simultaneously oversee several types of manufacturing processes.
The software worked as advertised. All financial processes are now integrated into one central database. This has allowed Hunter Douglas to consolidate its order entry, finance, customer service, and IT management processes—reducing head count significantly. Implementing consolidated business applications also gave Hunter Douglas greater insight into its expanding enterprise. "We now have all our businesses on a single computer system, with one database, which means we can quickly analyze data and make better decisions," says Ken Dixon, group IT manager at Hunter Douglas. "We've reduced manufacturing lead times and improved quality by more accurately producing products to specifications."
