The Client

The client has one of the largest consumer goods businesses in Vietnam. It is a manufacturer of leading brands in foods, home and personal care. They have deep roots in many provinces and many distributors across the country.

Business Needs

The client needs to optimize its supply chain, which was crucial to its success and continued growth, the company decided to remodel its supply chain by setting up a distribution management system (DMS). This program aims at reducing management efforts and energy spent on monitoring as well as to obtain more accurate data to make better decisions. The current system is very complicated. The newly collected data would be transferred to a central database in the headquarters and would help forecast sale and manufacturing needs in the future. The client also requires a seamless integration with the legacy system. They want the new packaged solution to form a new layer of the supply chain system.

Challenges

The key to implement an ERP system is to gain a deep insight into the company’s business processes and information systems. The diverse technology platforms of the client coupled with the fact that ERP is not a technology one can implement right out of the box meant numerous challenges

Solutions

  • FPT Software provided both a computer and a palm based system:
  • Set up of the client’s DMS based on the Solomon package software, which provides many features to manage activities of a medium-size company (Accounting, Inventory, Purchase Order, Sale Order…)
  • Development of a Palm Order Entry application, which help salesmen input data. The system allows salesmen to create a sales order on the Palm and it is then synchronized with the DMS system.

Project Summary

  • Set up of a team of 21 expert
  • FPT Software was involved in the end-to-end project: Business process definition, Program management, Package evaluation, Package implementation, and key user training, post- production support.
  • The team decided to use MS Solomon 4.5, as it is the best-suited package tool for the project.
  • Using Solomon solutions, the team steam lines the manufacturing, distribution, procurement and financial accounting processes of the client.
  • The processes are integrated into a forecasting & planning tool: Crystal report 8.0
  • MS SQL server 2000 is used for data storage.

Benefits

  • Better visibility on the supply chain and improved demand planning and execution.
  • The completion of the project simplifies access to information in MS Solomon database. Users can enter and approve requests from any location; look up inventory item availability; and provide customers and vendors with the access they need to view specific information within the system – all from a Web browser.
  • The management is much more efficient thanks to the new reporting tools. Reports have been conducted instantly based on actual data, and weekly reports have been completed in a fraction of the time previous needed, and the accuracy of forecast has been improved considerably.

Technologies Used

Solomon IV 4.5, SQL Server 2000, VB 6.0, CodeWarrior 5.0, Visual SourceSafe, Palm OS 4.0, Dameware.