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Anthony Etzel

How to Improve Customer Shipments With OTTO - A Case Study

Setting Industry Service Standards

Shenandoah Manufacturing, a $20 million producer of poultry-raising equipment (heaters and brooders), had been having difficulty for some time shipping orders to customers in a timely manner. They had successfully implemented a popular ERP system and had been using it for more than 3 years, yet the situation didn't improve. 

Customer Service Representatives were complaining about the frequent backorders and late orders. Employees were giving it their best effort, but were frustrated, and customers were threatening to take their business elsewhere.

The company considered installing an APS system as a possible solution, but found implementation would be difficult, expensive, and running the system might be a challenging task as a number of key business practices would have to be changed. A consultant familiar with OTTO suggested they look at that product as an alternative to APS. Several OTTO aspects cited by the consultant convinced them to consider a cursorily review. Specifically:

  • The non-intrusive nature of the product.
  • It's relative inexpensive initial investment.
  • The low overall total cost of ownership.
  • The integration with their ERP system.

The initial demonstration was impressive. OTTO was installed on Shenandoah's server within 45 minutes of arrival and, most impressively, it was fully functional with their real “live” data immediately. Needless to say, the demo was well received. Even more importantly Shenandoah was able to “test drive” the software to prove its applicability before making any dollar commitments.

According to Mark Shank, Information Systems Manager, some baseline measurements were made last year, and it was determined that approximately 50% of their customer orders had shipped on time. As they began using OTTO, on-time order performance rose to 90% for the month. And Shenandoah caught up on its entire backlog and started working ahead on February's orders. In February on-time shipment performance jumped to 92% and subsequently on-time performance has ranged somewhere between 98.3% and 99.5% — well above the 96% goal set by Management.

OTTO provides the means for keeping the whole production organization focused on the few things that have to happen as the ship date approaches to get each order shipped on time. Components that have the potential for delaying an order are identified so they can be managed. Shenandoah's staff, a precious and limited resource, now concentrates on analyzing information and managing the right things at the right time rather than digging out date. To quote one production control individual: “what use to take hours now takes seconds.”

According to Roy Hackett, Plant Manager: "Knowing the right things to pay attention to at the right time — information provided by OTTO — has allowed on-time shipping to be improved by 40 percentage points in less than one month and a lead time reduction from 3-4 weeks to 1-2 weeks on the most important products"

Guessing at what and how much of the work being processed is for real customer orders versus planned orders is eliminated which is especially important when capacity is short during the heavy portion of the business cycle. 

“By focusing on the right things at the right time, production expedites and interruptions are far fewer, production flow is much smoother and productivity is significantly improved.”

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Anthony Etzel

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Tips:  LX | BPCS | M3

TECHNOLOGY: Facility Security Ranges

Previously, a user could complete the Cost Transfer (CST920) process for any range of facilities regardless of their security settings established in SYS600. This enhancement verifies the user security settings set up in SYS600 before processing cost transfers for a range of facilities in CST920. If the user has authority for a facility range, but there are facilities within that range that are not authorized, the program skips those facilities and completes the cost transfer process.

FINANCE: Expiration Date for Quotes and RMAs

A Cancel-by-Date has been added to the Quote Header and RMA Header panels. This optional field can limit how long a quote or authorization to return items for credit is valid.  

For quotes, this enhancement provides an optional end date for the quote. For RMAs, it provides an optional date by which the customer must return the items to receive the credit listed on the RMA.

The Cancel-By-Date prints on the Order Acknowledgement and RMA Acknowledgement to inform the customer of this important limitation to the quote or return authorization. 

An Order Entry user cannot copy the quote to create a new order if the Cancel By Date has caused the quote to expire.

OPERATIONS: Default Split Salesperson to Customer Orders

Sales commissions are based on combinations of the Primary, Split, and Line-Level salesperson and the commission codes defined for the customer and item. You can now define the Split Salesperson in the same master files as the Primary Salesperson. While the Primary Salesperson is mandatory, the Split Salesperson is optional. It defaults during Order Create using the identical hierarchy as Primary Salesperson. Using Split Salesperson provides more flexibility in the calculation of sales commissions. The ability to define a default Split Salesperson improves the accuracy of sales commission qualification and calculation and reduces maintenance and adjustments necessitated by corrections.

Previously, a user could complete the Cost Transfer (CST920) process for any range of facilities regardless of their security settings established in SYS600. This enhancement verifies the user security settings set up in SYS600 before processing cost transfers for a range of facilities in CST920. If the user has authority for a facility range, but there are facilities within that range that are not authorized, the program skips those facilities and completes the cost transfer process.

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Tips: LN | Baan

You can use job management to schedule jobs based on your organizational requirements. For example, you can schedule jobs at non-peak hours to improve the overall system performance in a heavily loaded environment. A job consists of one or more sessions or shell commands, or both, that run without user interaction. The sessions and shell commands in a job can be started while you are not logged on to the ERP system. You can schedule jobs to start processes periodically, at a defined interval, or immediately. Typically, you use job management for print and processing sessions.

Job data  - To create a job, you must specify basic job data and link sessions or shell commands, or both, to the job. In the basic job data, you specify whether the job is periodical. For periodical jobs, you specify how the job will be scheduled.

Shared job data tables  - Typically, each company stores its own basic job data. As a result, a job runs for a particular company. However, in a job, you can also run sessions in more than one company. You can run sessions in multiple companies when the job data tables of the associated companies are physically mapped to a single main company.

Job execution - Jobs can be started in multiple ways. The job’s status defines how you can start the job. You can start the job if the job’s status is In Queue or Free.

Job history -  When the execution of a job stops, for example, when the job completes successfully or when a runtime error occurs, information is written to a history log. The job history contains information, such as the date and time of the execution and the reasons why the job and its associated session ended.

Sales quotations are used to supply a sold-to business partner with the required details to make a purchasing decision.

You can create a sales quotation in response to a request for quotation (RFQ) from a business partner, or as a sales tool to initiate the sales process with potential business partners. A quotation includes the dates, terms, items, or item descriptions to be sold, and a success percentage, which reflects the level of certainty that the quotation will be accepted. Sales quotations are included in the planning modules based on their success percentages. Quotations with a high success percentage are considered as sold.

You can print and send quotations to business partners. You can specify the results of the returned quotations in Sales. If the quotation is not accepted, you can...

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