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"Made2Manage, the leading provider of enterprise resource planning (ERP)
software and a broad range of services for manufacturers, and
Fuserashi International Technology, Inc. (F.I.T.),
a manufacturer of precision nuts, bushings, inner metals, piston blanks, and specialty cold formed steel
products."
Source : Consona/Made2Manage Systems
A Made2Manage Systems Customer Profile: The Story of Fuserashi International Technology, Inc. (F.I.T.)
International Technology is also known as :
International Building Technologies,
International Communication Technology,
International Component Technology,
International Engineering Technology,
International Information Technology,
International Internet Technology,
International Leading Technologies,
International Media Technologies,
International Office Technologies,
International Secure Technologies,
International System Technologies,
International Technologies Group,
International Technology Associates,
International Technology Company,
International Technology Industry,
International Technology Institute,
International Technology Management,
International Technology Supply,
International Test Technologies,
Access Technologies International,
Advanced International Technology,
Compatible Technology International,
Compliance Technologies International,
Comprehensive Technologies International,
Control Technology International,
Digital Technologies International,
Electronic Technologies International,
Emerging Technologies International,
Fuserashi International Technology,
Home Technology International,
Leasing Technologies International,
New Technology International,
Optimal Technologies International,
Performance Technologies International,
Policy Technologies International,
Protective Technologies International,
Quality Technology International,
Reassure Technologies International,
Retail Technologies International,
Rich Technology International,
Safe Technologies International,
Safety Technologies International,
Software Technology International,
Solution Technology International.
A System for Growing Companies
"People are just amazed at the business we are able to do. We run a $30 million
business with only 35 full-time employees. The Made2Manage system supports our
ability to operate so efficiently and continue to grow."
- Bill Cadman, Controller, F.I.T.
In 1996, Osaka, Japan-based Fuserashi Co. Ltd. founded Fuserashi International Technology,
Inc. (F.I.T.) in Cleveland, Ohio, to have a production and distribution arm closer
to Honda plants in Ohio, Alabama, and Canada. Within a few years, Honda and its
suppliers accounted for about 80 percent of F.I.T.'s revenue. Other customers included
CYT, Toyo, Yusa, American Showa, Topy, and Bridgestone.
F.I.T.'s quick success had a great deal to do with the supplier relationships of its parent
company-80 percent of the business involved redistribution for Fuserashi Co. Ltd. The
company grew quickly, expanding plant capacity three times in its first seven years as a
subsidiary. As revenue climbed, F.I.T. made a name for itself on quality. The company
racked up scores of awards as a quality and delivery benchmark leader for Honda of
America Manufacturing.
Growth Requires More Sophisticated Technology
In 2004, F.I.T. began to run into challenges. The company was using Microsoft' Great
Plains Dynamics to manage its inventory and parts, but other activities, including
accounting, quotes, sales orders, purchase orders, shipping, and receiving, were being
tracked manually, both inside and outside the system. The Great Plains system also
lacked a good reporting engine or a readable database structure. When support staff
were called to write a new report, it was an often unfamiliar, difficult, and expensive
process.
Furthermore, beyond its redistribution responsibilities, local cold forming production
made up about 20 percent of F.I.T.'s business. Like parent company Fuserashi Co. Ltd.,
F.I.T. manufactures precision nuts, bushings, inner metals, piston blanks, and specialty
cold formed steel products, which are used by the automotive industry for air bag,
brake, suspension, engine, and safety restraint technology. Without a forecasting or
planning module for production, F.I.T. had to perform data-intensive input tasks into
complex Excel spreadsheets, Access databases, and Word documents. These Microsoft
Office documents were not connected to the system database. Rather, they were manually
entered by hand, leaving a great deal of room for human error and misleading
information.
Return On Investment
At A Glance
Fuserashi International
Technology, Inc. (Cleveland,
Ohio), a manufacturer of
precision nuts, bushings,
inner metals, piston blanks,
and specialty cold formed
steel products, achieved
significant return on
investment within the first
two years of using the
Made2Manage' Enterprise
Business System:
- Increased sales by $3.2 million
(or 12 percent) without
adding staff.
- Achieved almost $700,000 in
inventory stock reductions via
improved forecasting of
internal and external demand.
- Increased product line, as well
as the value of inventory on
shelf itself, going from 20
manufactured parts and 60
redistribution parts to 70
manufactured parts and 200
redistribution parts.
- Eliminated the need for annual
physical inventory.
- Improved job costing by 100
percent, which led to more
profitable product pricing.
- Utilized 100 percent of current
capacity through improved
scheduling.
- Dramatically reduced time
spent on month-end closings.
The Kind of ERP System That "Fits"
According to Michael Lupico, IT coordinator for F.I.T., time was of the
essence to find a comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP)
system that would consolidate all operational activities into one system
and database. A cross-functional selection team quickly created a short
list of vendors, and soon narrowed them down to five, based on key
requirements. In particular, the team was looking for a software package
that offered:
- Job costing that would show the status of manufactured products.
- Sales order functionality that was integrated with the quoting process
and could accommodate changes quickly and often.
- Shipping and receiving capabilities.
- Planning and scheduling functionality that was integrated with sales
orders.
- EDI (electronic data interchange) capabilities for automated communication with
Honda's business system.
- Robust reporting that could be extracted into Excel.
- System flexibility that would allow F.I.T. to modify screens and reports to
accommodate unique business processes.
- Strong visibility into inventory that would generate better forecasting and more
accurate purchase orders from Fuserashi Co. Ltd.
According to Lupico, the only ERP system that could address all these requirements, plus
allow the small company room for future growth was the Made2Manage Enterprise
Business System from Indianapolis-based Made2Manage Systems. "The decision was
unanimous," he said.
A Successful Four-Month Implementation
Lupico said that time was a constant factor during implementation, which launched in
June 2004. The company insisted on an aggressive four-month timetable, implementing
not only the core Made2Manage system, but also the company's supply chain management
modules, and several small system customizations. In order to reach the October
go-live goal, the implementation became F.I.T.'s top priority, while still maintaining the
business. Lupico said, "Deadlines for implementation goals needed to be met correctly
and on time."
The team worked closely with their implementation consultant to follow Made2Manage
Systems' implementation methodology, which included several major milestones, such as
data conversion, process mapping, report development, system customizations, training,
and conference room modeling. From a training perspective, Made2Manage Systems'
education and support liaison helped the core team build a custom schedule of education
courses from M2M University, which provides virtual, recorded, live and personalized
education and training to Made2Manage customers. The M2M University service is
included as a standard offering in each Made2Manage customer's maintenance agreement.
On the fast track, F.I.T. completed 166 virtual courses in order to be prepared
upon go-live.
As planned, the company went live on the system four months later in October 2004.
Just over a year later, the company has seen a significant return on investment, ranging
from improved processes to bottom line savings.
Powerful Results
Fuserashi International Technology,
Inc. (Cleveland, Ohio) is
Made2Manage Systems' 2006
Transformation Award winner for
using the Made2Manage
Enterprise Business System to
generate revolutionary business
process changes. Instead of
struggling to capture information
from multiple, disparate
systems, F.I.T. brought enterprise-
wide data onto one system
and began to use that data to
focus on what mattered to them
most-profitability and growth.
The Fruits of Auto-Mation
First-time ERP systems are often difficult to measure-there is no
old data to compare to the new data. Controller Bill Cadman,
however, described a number of before/after scenarios that
illustrate improved processes and savings across the business:
Inventory Accuracy
First, F.I.T.'s inventory management significantly improved. Prior
to implementing the Made2Manage system, it was not uncommon
for the company to make $100,000 inventory adjustments. A
process that once took days now occurs in less than three hours.
"We're perpetually looking at our inventory levels, and they are
always accurate," said Cadman. "We'll probably eventually stop
taking annual physical inventory altogether."
Powerful Supply Chain Management
Second was the impact the Made2Manage Supply Chain Management
(M2M SCM) module had on multiple areas of the F.I.T. business. Prior
to implementing the Made2Manage system, employees were accessing what
was basically a financial system, with little visibility into the availability
of parts. F.I.T. was forced to hire someone just to manage scheduling via a
complex Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Today, that employee schedules
production via M2M Advanced Scheduling-a tool that schedules and
sequences all work center activities, while considering capacity and
material constraints.
Lupico added that the system has helped F.I.T. utilize 100 percent of
current capacity. "Our forecasting and scheduling of internal and external
demand has experienced a dramatic improvement," said Lupico. "It is easy
to conduct contract reviews and verify our ability to ship with a system
that tracks and shows scheduled availability. We are all looking at the
same data in real time, so the delays and errors from human calculation
that used to occur are no longer a risk factor for us. Additionally, our ability to track
and report our suppliers' performance to our requests has allowed us to apply pressure
where needed to strengthen our supply chain."
Prior to implementing the Made2Manage system, F.I.T. carried a great deal of inventory
on purchased parts from its parent company. Using M2M Demand Forecasting, which
allows users to quickly and accurately predict future demand for finished goods and
purchased parts, the F.I.T. team was able to reduce inventory stock by $700,000.
Fast Financial Reporting
Third, month-end closings, which used to take weeks, because analysts had to look at
each transaction independently, now take less than a day. "Improved financial reporting
has been significant for our president, who travels to Japan several times a year for
board meetings," said Cadman. "Now he has the most up-to-date, accurate information
available to share with them."
System Personalization
Another value-add has been the personalization Lupico has
incorporated into the system. Lupico facilitated a number of
screen modifications, using Visual Basic for Applications, a
programming language he learned through M2M University, and
M2M FastForms, a system modification tool. "We made small
changes to more than 12 of the main screens in the Made2Manage
system," said Lupico. "We wanted to get rid of the fields we
weren't using, and we wanted to add fields for unique data points
on which we wanted to report, such as having supplier and
advanced shipment notification numbers tied directly to sales
orders."
Lupico also generated several sophisticated custom data-driven
Excel reports F.I.T. wanted to improve its business processes,
including:
- A dynamic inventory simulation report that would pull data
from within the Made2Manage system to help sales
representatives provide more accurate quotes. Sales reps can see data on more than
250 parts, including how much is on hand, how much is on order, and the total dollar
value.
- A work center output report that provided more insight into plant capacity and
eventually spurred a friendly efficiency competition between the first and second
shifts, spurring improved productivity.
- A job costing report that detailed exact costing, from labor to scrap to materials, for
every job, leading to more accurate standard costs, and eventually, the creation of a
new manufacturing cost accountant position. According to Cadman, this report, along
with back office data collected by the Made2Manage system, allowed for a 100 percent
improvement in job costing since implementing the system. In addition, the job
costing discovery process has helped F.I.T. begin to determine more accurate and
more profitable product pricing.
"Having the right tools to analyze our performance has brought the attention level of
F.I.T. associates to a higher level," said Lupico. "We are all more capable of analyzing
and reporting on the immediate and projected impacts of changes that occur in our
industry. We are starting to focus on what really matters to us-our profitability."
"Having the right tools to
analyze our performance has
brought the attention level of
F.I.T. associates to a higher level.
We are all more capable of
analyzing and reporting on the
immediate and projected impacts
of changes that occur in our
industry. We are starting to
focus on what really matters to
us-our profitability."
- Michael Lupico,
IT Coordinator,
F.I.T.
Bottom-line Results
Cadman, Lupico, and Sales Manager Keith Albrecht also cited several key performance
indicators F.I.T. was able to achieve as a result of using the system, which most notably
included a $3.2 million (or 12 percent) increase in sales without adding staff.
F.I.T. also saw an increase in the variety of products, as well as the value of inventory on
shelf itself. "We went from 20 manufactured parts and 60 redistribution parts to 70
manufactured parts and 200 redistribution parts," said Cadman. These improvements
helped F.I.T. inch further toward one of its primary strategic goals, which is to continue
to expand its manufacturing operations by adding additional clientele and products.
"The implementation of the Made2Manage system has sparked a new era
of development for F.I.T.," said Lupico. "Instead of spending time
crunching numbers and struggling to capture information about our
state of affairs, we now spend our time analyzing the results of reports
made possible by the system."
"People are just amazed at the business we are able to do," said Cadman.
"We run a $30 million business with only 35 full-time employees. The
Made2Manage system supports our ability to operate so efficiently and
continue to grow."
For More Information
Contact:
Made2Manage Systems, Inc.
450 E. 96th Street, Suite 300 - Indianapolis, IN 46240
MAIN: (317) 249-1200 - FAX: (317) 249-1999
www.made2manage.com