Success Story

Apex Exploits the Power of MITS [Discover] with Customized Applications in Every Department

"MITS helped us to understand details of our business that had remained hidden for years."

The Circumstances
Apex Microtechnology Corporation, based in Tucson, Ariz., is a worldwide industry innovator in power analog (products that deliver output currents above one amp or operate on voltage supplies greater than 100 volts). Apex was founded in 1980 and today provides solutions for three key global markets: Industrial Controls, Test and Measurement, and Aerospace and Military Systems.

A privately held company with less than 100 employees, Apex is positioned in the OEM market for the competitive and fast-changing semiconductor industry. "Although we are small, we have many of the same requirements and needs for sophistication as much larger companies," explained Doug Porter, systems analyst at Apex.

So how does the company differentiate itself competitively against other high-tech OEMs? Through leading edge IT systems and software, such as the Avanté ERP system from Epicor and the MITS OLAP/BI solution, all running on UniData 5.2, Apex utilizes 12 servers running on either Windows Server 2003 or Windows 2000 sp4 and SQL Server middleware applications, including Epicor’s Clientele CRM system.

Doug Porter, a seven-year Apex employee and one of only four in the IT department, is responsible for all systems analysis and programming on the Avanté system, manages the MITS implementation, and supports the company’s networking infrastructure. He said it was about three years ago that Apex recognized the need for a business intelligence solution to replace its "printed reports that were typed into Excel spreadsheets."

"Our main problem," Porter said, "was the lack of flexibility in reporting our Bookings and Shipments numbers to management and the owners of the company."
 
The Solution
After reviewing a number of BI solutions including Cognos and Crystal Decisions, Apex said the decision to implement MITS was based mostly on price and time-to-implement. "MITS was about half the price of many of the solutions we reviewed," Porter said. "MITS also provided native connectivity to Avanté's UniData database, while Crystal Decisions would have relied on ODBC. And, like Cognos, it would have required extraction to a SQL Server or external environment in addition to the development of the analysis and reporting tools."

Porter continued to say that MITS’ native compatibility with Avanté and UniData environments was obviously an additional and critical benefit over the alternative solutions. "With MITS, we could leverage our existing knowledge, toolset, etc., and run it on the same server as Avanté. And with the ease of use in the MitsView client and the capabilities of MitsMaker, we realized we could do our own development work, instead of having to rely on outside consultants."

"Ease-of-use also played a role in choosing MITS," Porter said. "I was able to leverage my programming experience in Avanté and infrastructure support knowledge during the MITS implementation, which made the process fairly simple. And it usually takes me only 15 minutes or less to train a new MITS user, with ‘quick answer’ training provided on demand or on an as-needed basis."

Apex installed MITS in 2001, and within three years has developed and implemented twelve robust hypercubes that have become critical business tools for a variety of departments, including sales, finance, manufacturing / operations, quality engineering, and executive management. There are about 12 Apex employees that actively use MITS, most of whom are at the management level.

The Results
Dan Reid, the company’s director of IT, is part of the Apex management team that uses MITS on a daily basis and relies on the functionality and analysis of MITS to expose operations and processes using the company’s own data.

"MITS has allowed us to create an infrastructure where the management team can go to answer their own questions in a timely manner," Reid said. "The best example of this is when our new CEO was hired a few years ago. She quickly learned the power of MITS and lived in the MITS system for weeks until she really understood our business. For her, it was an invaluable tool."

Apex has clearly taken ownership of the features and functionality of MITS, having developed numerous and highly customized hypercubes to suit specific departmental reporting or research requirements. The OLAP/BI capabilities of the MITS system currently focus on five functional areas within the Apex organization:
 
  1. Bookings, Shipments and Top 10 Bookings / Top 10 Shipments
    This allows sales and executive management to get a clear view of bookings and shipments by region (North America vs. Europe vs. Asia, etc.), district (regional sales manager territory), customer type (market segment), and several categories of product type.


  2. G/L Income Statements
    This supports two analyses: the first is a detailed breakdown by G/L account number of the summary information found on the G/L Income Statement, and the second is the financial G/L analysis.


  3. Manufacturing/Operations
    This hypercube enables operations management to analyze the manufacturing results to get a clear picture of actual costs vs. standard costs in WIP (Work In Process), labor hours analysis, defects and scrap analysis, etc.


  4. Yield Analysis
    This ties into the scrap analysis, but is more of a number crunching and statistical analysis, whereas the scrap analysis provides insight into the reasons for the occurrence of scrap.


  5. Failures Analysis
    The quality engineering group uses this hypercube to better understand customer returns, with extensive analysis available on returned parts that passed quality testing, but failed in the field.
"MITS has provided a greater degree of insight into our bookings, shipments and manufacturing costs that we could only guess at before using MITS," Porter said. "That's a simple statement, but MITS really opened the doors for us to understand details of our business that had remained hidden for years. We could usually extrapolate the answers to our questions, but MITS lays everything out on the table for us, and does so with a greater granularity than ever before."

Reid echoed Porter’s enthusiasm for the MITS solution from his position as a corporate executive and one of the active users of MITS: "It’s one of the most successful tools we’ve ever implemented. The drill-down capabilities enable our employees to be more effective, and make smarter decisions. The end result is, data is power!"
 

 

    
Company Profile:

Name:
Apex Microtechnology Corporation

Distinction:
Worldwide industry innovator in power analog products

ERP Software:
Avanté from Epicor

Database:
IBM UniData

Web Site:
www.apexmicrotech.com
 
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