Successful businesses keep growing, but sometimes their business systems can’t grow with them. That was the case at Spindex Industries. Since 1981 Spindex has supplied precision engineered components to customers in industries like automotive, office equipment, power tools and consumer appliances. Today the company manufactures at four locations in Asia and employs more than 1,600 people.
This kind of growth can bring challenges in its wake. One was the inability of the old Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to support changing business needs. This outdated system was highly customized to suit how Spindex operated, but had never been updated, was unsupported, and lacked modern functionality.
Challenge: Better Production Planning Needed
Customers come to Spindex for their ability to engineer precision solutions, their competitive costs and a rapid turnaround. They also want predictable delivery performance.
Spindex recognized their old ERP system was not helping them satisfy these requirements. Upgrading their production planning activity would help them react faster and plan production better, reducing costs and improving delivery performance.
Full Business Assessment: Understanding What’s Needed
Rather than dive straight into ERP system selection, Spindex management decided they should assess their entire software ecosystem. This was when they engaged QAD to perform a Q-Scan. A QAD’s Q-Scan is a proprietary process for reviewing and analyzing a company’s entire business. The goal is to identify problems and find ways in which they can improve their business.
For Spindex the main conclusion was that many of their business methods had evolved over time, and they were not always using current best practices. They also learned that modern software has functionality not present in earlier generations of ERP systems. They were, however, impressed by how well the QAD team understood their business. Nicholas Tan, Group Managing Director, commented, “QAD took the time to understand our business and showed us how [their] software could help us improve.”
Phased Solution Implementation
Impressed by how the QAD team understood what was needed, Spindex decided to move forward with a QAD ERP solution. To provide consistency among the four manufacturing sites, QAD recommended a phased implementation process. This began by deploying the core model to facilities in Malaysia and Singapore, followed by Vietnam and finally, two sites in China.
A key step was implementation of a revamped Bill of Material (BoM) module. This gave immediate improvements in data accuracy, inventory management and cost analysis.
Phased system upgrades allowed for consistency in the process. This approach also provided time to train users on additional system features that they had not used before.
Solution: Improving Inventory Visibility and Traceability
The QAD solution has given Spindex far better visibility of inventory throughout their manufacturing operations, especially out on the factory floor. This enabled them to improve their scheduling process and provide more predictable delivery dates – key objectives for the project. Tan said, “Before, once a product went into production…we lost visibility. It was like being blindfolded. Now we can see each of these processes and it has allowed us to better plan and reduce the inventory of the organization as a whole.”
Traceability, a new function not previously available to Spindex, is part of this improvement. With the QAD system they know where all their materials are, all of the time.
A third benefit was that the new system let Spindex consolidate their IT into a centralized team. This allows IT to implement systems locally in a way that supports the core model, streamlining operations and further improving visibility.
To learn more about Spindex and their path to building an Adaptive Manufacturing Enterprise, take a look at the Spindex case study.
