Manufact thrives on e-commerce

By ADAM GIFFORD

While many large international software vendors have spent the year touting their electronic business and supply chain offerings, a North Shore software house has been quietly moving its customers to e-commerce.

Manufact managing director Ian Parker said his company had been in business for about 20 years, and had expertise in the apparel, distribution, transport and construction sectors.

Customers of its Acumen suite of products, which run on an Informix database, include Canterbury, Arthur Ellis, Yakka, Hartners, Provincial Freight and Temperature Controlled Distribution.

Concentrating on sales and installations to mid-tier companies has brought 25 per cent growth over the past year.

Mr Parker said competition was coming from some of the large ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendors such as SAP and JD Edwards pushing down into the mid-tier.

"We have two things in our favour. One is that unless they can get installation costs down, they will struggle in that market.

The second is they don't have smarts in fringe areas like advanced warehousing.

"We do things in warehousing they may be able to do, but only if they use third parties."

One of Manufact's key reference sites is Yakka Apparel Solutions, which last year won a 10-year contract to manage supply of clothing, footwear and other non-equipment supplies for the armed forces.

The operation, run from a warehouse in Albany, relies on an Acumen system, which costs $1.2 million - a third for hardware, a third for software and the balance in implementation.

"It enables us to do e-commerce with our suppliers and our customer, and it enables us to run a completely paperless warehouse and business," said Yakka's Simon Harvey.

Another customer is medical and healthcare products distributor Ebos Group, which recently replaced its warehousing and distribution system with Acumen.

"The idea was to smarten up our warehouse operation and improve efficiency in preparation for the implementation of the electronic business solution," Ebos IT manager Barry Higham said.

"You must have a slick warehouse operation to cope with extra orders that will come through the electronic system, and reduce the transaction cost of order fulfilment."

Using Advanced Warehouse, Ebos is able to process a third more orders from its 2300 sq m Albany warehouse with the same number of staff it had two years ago.

The company supplies more than 14,000 medical products to hospitals, pharmacies, GPs and other health providers in the Asia Pacific region.

Mr Higham said solutions offered by competitors were more expensive.

"We spent about $150,000 for the hardware and software for the Albany system, and we expect the electronic commerce package will cost a further $50,000."

The new system incorporates bar code and radio frequency technology. Mr Higham said order-picking accuracy for the 8000 orders done every month now stood at 99.76 per cent.

Advance Warehouse provides a digital footprint of the warehouse and directs the warehouse pickers to the bins where stock is held in the most efficient way.