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Background
Betatherm develops, manufactures and markets high quality NTC precision thermistors. Established in 1983 in Shrewsbury, MA, USA, the company has developed considerable expertise in producing high specification devices for a large number of sectors, the fastest growing of which are the automotive, aerospace, medical and general instrumentation. Other industries served include telecommunications, consumer goods, process control, high reliability, heating, ventilation and air conditioning.
Betatherm services customers worldwide from the manufacturing facilities located in the USA, Ireland, and the Caribbean.
Business Requirement
The general requirement was for a system to support the Sales Department in generating Sales Forecasts (The existing process was performed manually in MS Excel). This forecasting is based on Sales History, which is extracted from the CS/3 Order Processing module.
The key requirements of the system were
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- Shipped/Scheduled Orders Visibility i.e. Sales History extraction from CS/3.
- A facility to manually enter Budget figures for the full Year as well as a feature to allow for the manual entry / revision of monthly Forecast figures.
- Provide summary & detailed reports with sales analysis by Product Category, Key Account Manger, Customer and other key attributes.
- Support the planning process for Sales, Operations and Finance by providing each with required analysis reports.
- Facility to measure monthly Forecast Accuracy
- Provide Localisation Parameters e.g. Site Id, Base Currency, Warehouse etc…
Solution
Over a two-year period Genbase Solutions, in co-operation with Betatherm, have delivered a comprehensive and robust planning tool. An MS Access/VBA processing engine facilitates the extraction and analysis of Order Sales using Crystal and integrated MS Excel reports. Genbase solutions were responsible for the requirements analysis, system design, development, UAT support and installation of the solution (Ireland and US plants). Genbase are also providing on-going enhancements and support for the system.
Conclusion
- The Budgeting and Forecasting processes are more automated and less time consuming, as the required information is available from a single source.
- The planning process is more accurate leading to improved anticipation of customers needs.
System
Architecture
- CS/3 Order Processing module running on SQL Server.
- ODBC link to CS/3 data from MS Access Budget and Forecasting Tool.
- Integrated MS Excel Reports and Crystal Reports.
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