A privately owned organisation with facilities in the UK and China, Teconnex is a world-class manufacturer of specialised jointing solutions for a diverse range of industries across the globe. With a history dating back to 1954, Teconnex— as we know it today—was formed in 1997 following the merger of two well-established V-clamp manufacturers. Boasting products such as V-clamps, band clamps, gaskets, couplings, and press clamps, Teconnex offers a range of products to suit specialist applications from a single prototype to full production phases.
Business growth and global expansion
Following the merger and considerable domestic successes, Teconnex decided to explore opportunities further afield, and was looking to expand into China, Asia, and Latin America. However, the company felt that the existing IT and manufacturing processes were inhibiting its business goals at home, and were incapable of supporting international expansion plans.
One of the key issues Teconnex was confronting was the breadth of parts it produced. The company has a catalogue of 8,000 parts, and—on average—20 new parts are added to its system weekly. Inevitably, this presented issues in processing orders through its manual part-order process and Teconnex knew that this process needed to be updated before the company could embark on its ambitious plans for growth.
“Office-based work processes traditionally tended to be paper based, but with an ambitious growth strategy, we needed to digitise our current ways of working in order to streamline these processes and move valuable resources elsewhere in the business to support business growth,” says Daniel Topp, head of IT at Teconnex.
Realising how vital it was for the company to streamline its internal processes and improve customer services, Teconnex decided that it would need to undertake a major software overhaul. The organisation knew its aging IT and manual processes were holding it back, and a more sophisticated system was needed to meet its demands.
“Our manual processes were not sustainable. We needed to improve the way we handled the part-order procedure and update our entire old platform,” adds Topp.
Results and planning for the future
After market research and careful consideration, the business chose to implement the case management module in Epicor enterprise resource planning (ERP) as the best solution to meet their extensive catalogue-of-parts requirement and growth plans. Following the case management processes implementation in Epicor ERP, the Teconnex team reported that they saw business benefits almost overnight. The processes were modernised and improved, the visibility of all orders through the manufacturing chain were clearer and became more easily traceable. Everything was digitised—cutting down on archiving and document processing, and cutting down on unnecessary “paper bundles.”
“After implementing case management in Epicor ERP and replicating our previously manual workflows to virtual ones, we have managed to half the process time, create a completely paper-less system, and save a vast amount of work hours per week. This increased efficiency has allowed us to cut the time it takes to complete processes by between 50 to 75 percent and also improve customer service. In addition, it’s given us an efficient, simple, and straightforward process with clear visibility and traceability, freeing up our time to focus on planning for further growth and international expansion. In fact, implementing Epicor ERP has allowed us to expand into China, and we are well on our way to reaching Latin America and Asia too,” concludes Topp.
With its outstanding planning and deployment of Epicor ERP, which resulted in an enhanced overall business performance, Teconnex was announced winner of the “Business Transformation Highly Commended” award in 2016 at the Epicor UK Customer Excellence Awards. Teconnex was selected after its success story, which not only stood out among other submissions, but also set new standards for other organisations and project teams to emulate.
