Did you know that in July 2014, the amount of furniture manufactured in the UK hit an 8 month high with output reaching £656 million for that month! Of that figure £35.5 million was sold overseas. Furniture for the UK market rose by 15%, whereas export values fell by 19%. The UK retail industry saw a 23% rise in orders compared to 12 months ago last August. This is the largest rise since records began in 1988.
“It’s no wonder Syscom has been busy over the last 8 – 12 months developing Microsoft Dynamics AX to dovetail into the Furniture Manufacturing industry with seamless results,” said Keith Pittaway, Business Consultant at Syscom PLC. He continued: “We’ve been working with major furniture manufacturers to install and implement their ERP systems and help to streamline operations so that they can cope with the Christmas rush.”
Syscom has been specialising in providing specialist business software using Microsoft Dynamics AX to the Furniture manufacturing industry for more than two years. They have an excellent ability to understand complex manufacturing requirements and processes and put them to work in an easy to use way using Microsoft Dynamics AX Advanced Product Configurator. The Advanced Product Configurator allows furniture manufacturers to create product variants that each have a unique bill of materials (BOM), and route directly through to production.
“Those that make, often don’t trust those that sell to get things right,” said Keith. “The Product Configurator takes away any confusion as to what has been ordered and what has not. It automatically builds the bill of materials directly from a sales quotation or order and routes it straight through to manufacturing & production. Orders are planned by delivery load to maximise production capability whilst reducing storage space requirements. Components from suppliers are automatically scheduled to arrive at the right place at the right time reducing purchase commitments and delivery delay. This is a complete solution that integrates every part of your business to give you the direct impact on production costs and improvements to customer delivery lead times and customer satisfaction levels.”
Key functionality our customers benefit from with Advanced Product Configurator are:
· A configured Q&A that enables retail outlets/other company divisions and web sites to send orders directly through to manufacturing automatically using an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) routine which handles configurations from a file to produce the correct Bill of Materials (BOM) & routing.
· It handles 1000’s of fabrics and multiple options at once using highly complicated cost and price bands that are simplified and automatic including additive pricing.
· Selling/manufacturing using different brands via multiple outlets including the internet using one central system.
· Once complicated cross query reports are available as standard.
“You only need to create a product when it is meaningful for you, and everything else is a configuration based upon it,” said Keith. “Configurations are generated based upon simple, easy to understand rules that you define. Everything from then on is automatically generated whether it’s for a one off or just a variation on a theme, the Advanced Product Configurator from Syscom handles it all.”
Syscom customers can now be sure that their requirements are taken care of and all of the information required to meet their customer’s needs is catapulted in a straight forward and efficient manner through their manufacturing process to their customer’s door within the agreed time scales.
