Tyre wholesaler on track with Dynamics NAV
With wholesale depots in Cork and Dublin plus five retail depots, Glanworth Tyres is Ireland’s leading tyre distributor. Working with suppliers like Dunlop, Michelin Bridgestone, Cooper, Marshall and Trayal at one end of the supply chain, and around 1,000 ‘tyre shops’ and garages at the other, Glanworth operates a complex and fast-moving supply chain.
Situation
At the core of Glanworth’s business is a telesales team that bring in up to 400 orders a day. Customers are buying from a vast inventory of up to 50,000 tyres with 5,000 separate stock codes that identify different manufactures, rim sizes and tread.
The sales cycle is well established and starts when the telesales person pulls up a customer’s contact details and sales history, makes a call and secures an order.
After the bill of sale is done, picking sheets go out to the warehouse on a regular basis during the day. The stock is marshalled at the loading point, the sales data completed, the picks done and the shipments printed out. The trucks are loaded and the orders dispatched.
On the supply side, tyres come from the UK, Europe, Asia and the US. For the US orders in particularly, Glanworth has to work with long lead times and calculate the best way to fill a container that is shipped every six weeks. It is imperative to plan carefully for the right mix of products that will meet demand and maximise the space in the 40 foot container.
The problem was that Glanworth’s financial software package was struggling to cope with the scale of the business. “It had been customised and modified to the point that it was beginning to come apart at the seams,” said Richard Rea, Administration Manager, “and it was leaving us short of where we wanted to be.”
Looking for improved productivity, profitability, greater visibility of costs across the supply chain and better customer service, the MD decided that the best way to progress the financial management software was with Microsoft Dynamics NAV. As a Microsoft house he saw advantages for all the staff in the familiarity of the Windows environment, and for his personal needs he could see potential benefits from its easy integration with Excel spreadsheets.
Solution
Glanworth Tyres selected Coleman Computer Services to deploy Microsoft Dynamics NAV. The software’s functionality had a strong fit with the company’s requirements.
As well as recording and storing financial records in a central general ledger it gave Glanworth a flexible solution for solving its distribution challenges, helping to better track and maintain inventory with real-time shipment data. Accessed by around 20 employees, it provides up-to-date stock information and enables better warehouse management, including tailored pick orders to facilitate the accurate selection of tyre brands and sizes. The picking lists provide the pickers with bin locations where the tyres are stocked.
“The backroom side was up and running in a couple of days and worked well from the outset,” said Rea. Migrating to NAV was made easier because it was a Microsoft product. “It made sense to go with something that the majority of people we employed - and were likely to employ in the future - would have some familiarity with Windows through other applications.”
More challenging has been the deployment of the sales component. Glanworth Tyres has unique requirements in this area and the order-taking component of Dynamics NAV required customisation to enable the telesales team to fulfil their route-based delivery schedule effectively. “This proved to be the most difficult part of the implementation,” said Rea, “but, with Colman’s assistance, we rose to this challenge and implemented an enhancement that meets our unique requirements thereby giving us the business edge we were looking for.”
Benefits
Since its deployment Microsoft Dynamics NAV has delivered tangible benefits to Glanworth:
- Improved visibility of their products costs and margins. It provides accurate margin information, with all costs associated with the product accurately captured and entered into the system at the point of sale.
- Improved stock control. The use of bin locations in the warehouse has greatly improved stock accuracy and efficiencies around the picking of tyres. NAV also supports better stock management and enables cycle counting to be carried out with relative ease.
- Replenishment of stock both in the main warehouse and outer warehouses (replenished from the main warehouse) is now streamlined and saves time.
- Improved information. Glanworth Tyres has access to sales and supply chain data that can better inform the business going forward both in terms of sales performance and stock control.
The software has also had a more profound impact on the business, prompting the management to revisit some of its processes to make them more structured and efficient. “Dynamics NAV demands internal discipline in terms of organisational processes – I see that as a positive,” said Rea.
Dynamics NAV has also introduced new levels of data mining. Every product can be tracked and traced within the supply chain, a level of visibility that was simply not there before. And automated systems, based around single-entry data, means there is less room for manual error in the system. This all adds up to a more efficient supply chain which means better customer service.
Rea explains how this visibility benefits his own work. “I will typically start running reports on Monday morning and before lunchtime I have a good idea of what stock I need. For example, when an order is generated for the UK supplier the document is exported to Excel. The order shows product codes, descriptions and quantities. The numbers can be adjusted ensuring that the container will be filled to capacity. The load ships out of the UK on Wednesday and we will receive it Friday morning. The delivery paperwork is up on the system with prices and products checked and corrections made by close of play, completing the cycle. The receiving paperwork also contains our bin locations enabling correct warehousing operations.”
Similarly, the system has made easier work of packing the US containers, meeting orders and maximising the container loads.
Rea sums up the benefits: “It is a combination of a number of things, from imposing more discipline on us as a business to improved streamlining and greater efficiencies.”
Summary
“Glanworth Tyres needed to improve visibility of our costs to help us negotiate better prices from our suppliers and to improve our margins” said Lance O’Riordan, Glanworth’s Managing Director. “We selected Microsoft Dynamics NAV from Colman because of its ability to provide the accurate information that we needed around product and employee profitability.”
While the software has provided business critical, short-term benefits, Glanworth is also looking to the future with Dynamics NAV. “Microsoft’s commitment to investing in the product going forward gives us confidence that our investment will have long term benefits and that the solution will develop in line with our business.”
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© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published May 2008
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published June 2008