Management Information Systems
Service: Management Information Systems | Sector: Public Sector, Private Sector or Social Enterprise | Industry: Manufacturing
Clients Brief
Performance Masterbatches Ltd is a leader in the field of development and manufacture of colour and performance masterbatches for the plastics industry. The company strategy identified a need to
Determine if and how the primary business processes could be improved to reduce the sales cycle and raise customer service.Determine changes to the methods and processes used to produce management information so as to reduce administration overhead and provide more timely reports.
Findings
The majority of reporting is used by the 4 main operational areas, Sales, Colour Matching, Production, and Finance. For each of these areas the following was determined:
- Reports generated
- Tools used
- Purpose of report
- Frequency of use
- Source of data
- Time taken to administer
All reports were assessed by the amount of maintenance effort required to input data, to generate and distribute, and the primary weaknesses identified. The following issues were identified:
- Disparate data sources result in a high administration overhead.
- Too much processing/transactional data is held off system, particularly Production.
- The existing system provides a good tool for sales administration and aids sales management, but the lack of the structured and open database severely limits how this information can be used.
Recommendations
A more robust and long term solution introduces a suitable CRM package, preferably as part of an integrated system with finance and production.
Outcome
A team was formed with representatives from all operational areas that contained a detailed knowledge of the primary business processes. The team were trained in the following:-
- How to analyse a process, identify each operation within it and define the type of process.
- How to present this information in a flow-chart using Microsoft Visio and how to use the common flow-chart symbols.
- All key processes were identified and analysed and tasks were categorised as:
- Value added (VA) - Activities that directly generate and satisfy a customer need for which the customer will pay
- Business sustaining (BS) - Activities that are essential for the business to function but are not value adding.
- Non-value added (NVA) - All other activities that are non essential and are wasteful.
The management gained an understanding of potential replacement systems and their indicative costs to build into future budget plans. It also demonstrated that with the effective implementation of an integrated sales and operations system, that the administrative overhead could be reduced by over 25%
Click here for more Case Studies
