"SAP Business One gives us better stock control and saves us significant man hours" - Chris Clarke, General Manager, Quinton Major.
Quinton Major Precision Ltd, a highly respected supplier of engineered components and assemblies for the UK automotive industry, discovers that SAP Business One, supplied and supported by BetaGen, offers unprecedented opportunities to manage and centralise operations.
The client: Quinton Major Precision Ltd.
The project: Management of stock, bills of materials, material requirements planning and sales processing.
Objectives: To install a user-friendly system to reduce the time and manpower expended on stock control and materials management. To improve the accuracy of stock level reporting and develop the ability to predict future demand.
Results: The Material Requirements Planning function in SAP Business One is now used to forecast demand and auto-generate purchase orders to suppliers, where these were previously entered manually. Coupled with this, the key Alerting feature notifies Quinton Major when each re-ordered item or material is due to arrive, keeping them in constant and effective contact with their suppliers, and helping them manage their inventory in a cost-effective, real-time way.
Into the future: Quinton Major hopes to reap the benefit of the SAP Business One system by rolling it out across other areas of the business, including financial analysis and customer relationship management.
The story: Quinton Major was established in 1982 and has become a major player in the supply of engineered components and assemblies for the UK automotive industry. They currently deal with upwards of 120 suppliers, who supply a variety of materials and components from base metal to complex units. Managing these supplies is a highly complex operation, and Quinton Major has expended many hundreds of man hours in maintaining correct stock levels for their current projects. Their existing system was unable to provide reliable stock figures.
BetaGen proposed SAP Business One as a solution to the stock management issue. Quinton Major's management team was reassured by the suggested choice, since they were aware of SAP's strong market reputation. Many of their own customers, for example, JCB, have run a SAP solution for many years. In the past, SAP's systems have often been aimed at the large company market, but SAP Business One represents a newer, more affordable small-to-medium business system, ideal for companies with 10 to 100 employees. An added bonus was that the Business One system was able to run on existing hardware without the need for a new server, nor a costly hardware upgrade of client PCs.
The underlying database of SAP Business One - Microsoft SQL - is compatible with many other standard software applications, which has allowed Quinton Major to integrate the system to other reporting tools. BetaGen offers comprehensive after-sales support, and the size and world-class standard of SAP gave Quinton Major additional confidence.
The Business One Alerting feature informs Quinton Major when deliveries are expected. This enables management to make quick and informed decisions about current needs and space requirements. In addition, SAP Business One's unique XL Reporter allows business-specific data to be displayed in an easy-to-read format in Microsoft Excel. For example, JCB's order schedules to the company can be viewed on Business One with an XL Reporter view, showing demand for three months ahead across various product lines. This makes it easy for Quinton Major to review their planned purchasing, to ensure that they maintain optimal stock levels.
Chris Clarke, General Manager of Quinton Major, says, "We had confidence in SAP Business One as a world-class system and it is set to both save us man hours and increase productivity and efficiency."
Kevin Lief of BetaGen said, "After the seamless integration of SAP Business One into their existing processes, we are looking forward to working with Quinton Major to roll it out across other areas of the business."
