G-BEC helps
Palliser centralize their product data
Business Problem/Opportunity:
Aggressive growth in Palliser’s Upholstery division
was not supported by adequate growth in its systems.
The strategic business needs dictates being open to
millions of product configurations. The setup of
these configurations was very labor intense and
inefficient to the extent that, in some cases,
customer service used to wait for the product to be
setup to accept orders. In addition, the product
data was scattered over a combination of main server
and few homegrown databases. The net effect being
increases in product time to market combined with
inconsistent product costing data.
Solution:
G-BEC worked with its partner Pankratz Solutions
Inc. and Palliser’s business analysts to document
the problems/opportunities and design a solution.
The main problem was that MAPICS, the ERP that
Palliser had been using in its case-goods division,
was implemented on top of a home grown costing and
scheduling system. This resulted in an improperly
implemented system that was incapable of adjusting
to Palliser’s needs in maintaining and using their
product data.
The suggested improvements involved the
re-implementation of the Knowledge Based
Configurator (KBC) and Product Data Management (PDM)
modules of MAPICS. Also, development of some
customized maintenance tools and costing reports.
G-BEC was involved mainly in Project Management
capacity but also helped in the Application
Development.
Result:
The implemented systems resolved the existing time
to market issue and allowed for practical
centralized storage and maintenance of the product
data which resulted in more consistent product and
order costing.
