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Success Story
AdvancedWare Helps Preco Deploy MITS for
Company-wide Productivity Gains
Contract Manufacturer Creates MITS Cubes to Enhance Manufacturing and
Engineering Processes
The Company
Preco Electronics, Inc., a 56-year old contract manufacturer based in
Morton, Ill., provides electronic products and manufacturing services to
many of the industry's leading Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM's).
Its solutions include concurrent engineering, design assistance, PCB and
electronic assembly, test engineering, software programming, system
integration, final testing and post-manufacturing services.
Preco's 58,000-square foot manufacturing facility and EMS services may be
robust, but its IT and business operations run lean. The 175 Preco
employees are supported by an IT staff that includes just one system
developer and one network administrator, supported by one part-time intern
and one part-time liaison between Manufacturing and IT.
This resourceful IT department supports Preco's $30 million manufacturing
operation using the DataFlo ERP system on a Win2000 server running IBM's
UniVerse database. Additionally, Preco uses add-on solutions from
AdvancedWare, an IBM reseller that integrates real-time browser and mobile
handheld solutions with U2 (UniVerse and UniData) database systems.
As a successful manufacturing partner, Preco prides itself in embracing
state-of-the-art technology and offering turnkey services with efficient
operations. This gives the company the required flexibility to meet rapidly
changing customer needs in the contract manufacturing industry. This motto
was the driving force behind its recent decision to implement the MITS
business intelligence system company-wide.
The Circumstances
"As our company has grown, the IT staff has not," said John Koch-Northrup,
systems analyst at Preco. "Therefore, we're constantly looking for
productivity enhancements and efficiencies to get the job done with less
people in less time."
Koch-Northrup said he realized many years ago that too many man-hours were
spent responding to end user requests, which included gathering, converting
and manipulating data for a variety of customized reports . and then
recreating the wheel every time. "We generated many of our reports by
dumping the DataFlo data into Excel and manipulating it into spreadsheets,"
he said. "But we only did this on an as-requested basis, because it was a
difficult and time-consuming process. The data was hard to access so we had
to force feed it to get what we wanted."
According to Jason Janssen, Preco's Kaizen Leader and the liaison between
the manufacturing and IT departments, "Most of the daily and weekly
requests from our DataFlo users were for reports. An example would be, `How
many of this particular product did we ship to all of the different
facilities?' It wasn't easy to get a breakdown out of the DataFlo system
where all of those shipments went."
Janssen said the report requests were escalating throughout the company.
"Although it's been more prevalent with middle management, just about every
group in the company has requests for some type of report, including
program managers, order analysts, engineers, purchasing, accounting, etc."
"Our business lives on data," Janssen exclaimed. The circumstance? Preco
needed a business intelligence solution to help it better understand,
anticipate and act on business data in a timely and real-time basis.
The Search
Koch-Northrup began the process of reviewing potential business
intelligence solutions a few years earlier. That's when he found MITS, an
Online Analytical Processing/Business Intelligence (OLAP/BI) suite of
products designed to gather, manage, distribute and analyze data for
improved strategic and tactical decision-making. "I'd seen MITS
demonstrated at DataFlo user meetings in the past and liked it immediately
because of its versatility and ability to run natively on UniVerse. All
other solutions I'd seen involved transforming the data to another
platform, such as Microsoft SQL Server. It would have been a problem to add
another database that none of us were very fluent in managing."
"One of the driving factors of going with MITS is that we have people
in-house that understand how UniVerse works, how the programming works and
how the dictionary works," he continued. "MITS sits right in UniVerse so it
uses the same dictionary structure, connects directly to the DataFlo files
in production to create the cubes, understands MultiValue and runs in a Web
browser."
Although Koch-Northrup and his peers were already sold on the idea of MITS,
it wasn't until Preco became a customer of AdvancedWare last year that it
got the ball rolling to install MITS in late 2002. AdvancedWare had become
a MITS reseller earlier in the year, using MITS as the engine behind its
data-warehousing product, AWSalesReports. AdvancedWare integrates MITS with
ERP applications that run on UniData or UniVerse, including DataFlo,
Avanté, ManFact and others.
Preco has embraced all of AdvancedWare's solutions to date, including
AWMail, a solution that allows Preco to email directly out of DataFlo;
AWForms, which allows the creation of forms from DataFlo into MS Word and
then be directly emailed or faxed; AWXML, which allow Preco to set up
orders and ASNs through XML and a customer site; and AWViewer, which allows
any document, such as drawings or specs, to be launched from within DataFlo.
The Solution
With sales and technical support from AdvancedWare, Preco purchased
MitsMaker in addition to AWSalesReports. MitsMaker is a Windows-based design
tool that allows rapid design and deployment of OLAP hypercubes from any
MultiValue system file.
According to Koch-Northrup, "MitsMaker was an important tool for us because
we wanted to delve into the way we do business, and sales analysis,
although important, wasn't our top priority. We don't track sales by
territory or region the way other companies do."
Preco initiated the MITS implementation at the end of 2002, and began to
roll out AWSalesReports and other MITS cubes to the first departments in
early February, 2003.
"AdvancedWare provided top-quality training and phone support during the
entire implementation phase," Janssen said. "After our first day of
training, we already had two cubes cranked out. It was a piece of cake!
It's so easy to start working in MITS when you already know the UniVerse
environment."
Koch-Northrup agreed: "Once you get past the initial training, MITS is
pretty intuitive. User training has gone smoothly, we haven't had too many
questions directed our way, and the users have been digging into it from
the start. So far, it's been a very user-friendly program."
The Results
Janssen and Koch-Northup were eager to share this new tool with the
company, and so excited that within the first two months they had already
created 10 hypercubes using MitsMaker, customizing them for a variety of
Preco's business functions. This first group of hypercubes include: MRP,
SHIPMENT, BACKLOG, SCRAP, DOWN.TIME, PS (part shortages), RECEIPTS,
INVENTORY, AND SALES.
Preco's middle managers were the first to be trained on the new OLAP tool,
including how to use AWSalesReports to slice and dice the company's sales
information.
Next, the engineering department was given the SCRAP hypercube to look at
scrap dollars, parts and assemblies. "The engineers love it because they
can look at the main causes behind scrapping materials, isolate the
problems, and get them resolved immediately," Janssen said.
Engineers are also utilizing two other cubes customized to make their
processes more efficient. "The INVENTORY hypercube allows them to drill
into the inventory data and look at the value of inventory by customers,
parts classification, buyer, and more," Janssen continued. "The DOWN.TIME
hypercube permits engineers to evaluate the downtime of critical equipment
and make timely adjustments to enhance productivity."
With 10 hybercubes under its belt and proving productive, the Preco IT
team isn't about to rest on its laurels. It already has four more
hypercubes in development, including BUDGET (actual versus projected costs
by GL code with drill-down by director and manager); DEFECT.DATA (a Visual
Basic application collecting defect data, and moved into UniVerse through
Redback); BACKLOG.HIST (a weekly snapshot of open orders for the Accounting
Department to compare this week's orders to the orders that existed last
week); and FORECAST (a quarterly forecast that is currently handled in
Excel.)
One of the first groups to embrace Preco's newly created analysis tool was
the Purchasing department. Its unique MRP hypercube displays MRP data to
analyze excess supplies per buyer and project inventory levels.
"Before MITS, it would take me about 45 minutes every Monday morning to
generate this Supplies report for Purchasing," Janssen remembered. "I'd
take data from three different DataFlo reports and combine it in Excel to
come up with the data the buyers were looking for."
Today, Janssen is a happy man, with a lot more time to do other projects on
Monday morning. "With MITS, the buyers now have data at their fingertips
that's more accurate and more up to date than anything I've ever seen. So
not only are we saving 45 minutes at least once a week, the buyers can now
look at this information every single day. And it's so much more accurate!"
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Company Profile:
Name:
Preco Electronics, Inc.
Distinction:
Electronic products and manufacturing services provider
Employees:
175
ERP Software:
DataFlo from Epicor
Database:
IBM UniVerse
MITS Value Added Reseller:
AdvancedWare
Web Site:
www.preco-morton.com
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