Company Name Fusion UV Systems, Inc. United States
Industry Manufacturing (ultraviolet curing equipment)
Key Challenges
Make purchase-order process more efficient
Implement IT system capable of handling complex capacity planning and manufacturing
Improve efficiency of deliveryscheduling process
Make month-end closing faster and less costly
Reduce pricing errors
Implementation Partner N2 Consulting LLC
Solution and Services FastTrack, a mySAP™ All-in-One partner solution from N2 Consulting LLC
Existing Environment Legacy systems
Implementation Highlights
Six month implementation from project inception to go-live
No interruption of day-to-day business during implementation
Key Benefits
Shipping accuracy improved to more than 96%
Faster and more accurate purchase order process
Faster and less costly monthend closing
100% accurate pricing
Hardware Hewlett-Packard
Operating System UNIX with an Oracle database
FUSION ENSURES ON-TIME PRODUCT DELIVERY – AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION – WITH A mySAP™ All-in-One SOLUTION
Fusion UV specializes in curing, but it’s not a healthcare facility. Since 1971, the Gaithersburg, Maryland–based firm has made equipment for ultraviolet (UV) curing, an advanced photochemical process in which ultraviolet light instantly dries or “cures” inks, coatings, and adhesives.
Fusion is the world’s leading producer of UV curing equipment. Its products are state of the art, and it has a reputation for delivering them on time. But not long ago, Fusion’s outdated IT landscape threatened its ability to deliver promised products on time to its customers. The company’s manufacturing environment is so complex that its legacy IT systems couldn’t handle the load, threatening Fusion’s ability to meet its promised delivery dates.
It was clear something had to change. That’s why the company implemented FastTrack, a mySAP™ All-in-One solution for complex manufacturing from SAP partner N2 Consulting LLC. mySAP All-in-One partner solutions for small and midsize businesses are based on SAP® technology and delivered by partners that are experienced in various industries. With FastTrack, Fusion now completes capacity planning in about an hour and can hit its delivery dates.
WORLD-CLASS PRODUCTS FROM A MIDSIZE COMPANY Fusion is a business unit of Spectris plc, a publicly traded company on the London Stock Exchange. The company has sites in France, Germany, Japan, China, and the United Kingdom, with sales and distribution reaching more than 10,000 customers in 25 countries. “We’re a midsize business, a highly complex, integrated manufacturing company,” explains Sarah Mather, vice president of business systems administration at Fusion.
Fusion manufactures complex products in an environment that runs the gamut from make to order to engineer to order. The company’s products – an irradiator (which emits radiation onto the surface being cured) and a power supply – are built on two separate production lines, meaning the company has to process two work order steps in parallel.
OUTDATED SYSTEMS HINDER CAPACITY PLANNING Capacity planning in such a manufacturing environment is an extreme challenge. Fusion’s outdated systems just couldn’t handle the complexity of manufacturing and the required capacity planning. “We were operating in a legacy environment that was closed – it didn’t allow access to any other applications,” explains Mather. “We have five external offices, and our main software between our U.S. office and our European sites used two different databases. Our legacy system was archaic and not suitable for upgrading into a more open system. We also had processing problems, and because of that, we were unable to do capacity planning efficiently.” As a result, the company sometimes couldn’t deliver on the promised date, or it had to scramble to make a delivery date, often incurring additional costs.
Fusion needed an IT system that could handle both complex manufacturing and complex capacity planning. “SAP solutions can do that,” says Mather. “And the partner-relationship-management functionality in SAP is the best of the products we evaluated.”
MANAGING COMPLEX PARTNER RELATIONSHIPS That’s important for Fusion because its partner relationships are as complex as its manufacturing environment. Fusion’s sales force is national and international, and each sales representative has an exclusive geographical area. The selling cycle is very complex and spans multiple relationships. For example, for just one customer, an end user may be located in one geographical region, a machine integrator in another, and a decision maker in a third. A sale to such a company could involve three different independent sales reps. To manage the situation and the various partner relationships, Fusion uses the sales and distribution capabilities of its SAP software to manage sales commissions.
The SAP solution will also provide a basis for managing customer relationships for Fusion. “Another reason that we chose SAP was that we wanted a solution that contains customer relationship management (CRM),” says Mather. “Although we won’t implement CRM for some time, we wanted it to be an integral part of the solution so we wouldn’t have to deal with middleware or interfaces between different solutions. For a midsize company like ours, it’s an advantage to be dealing with only one vendor who is managing the whole product, and we’re able to do that with SAP.”
SMOOTH IMPLEMENTATION The implementation at Fusion took only six months from project inception to go-live. One of Fusion’s goals was that the conversion to SAP would be transparent to customers, and it achieved that goal: business was not interrupted during implementation.
The implementation also revitalized Fusion’s essential business processes for finance and supply chain. The company used to maintain a separate database for its custom products; that database is now part of the SAP landscape, which gives the products more visibility by displaying them online.
Mather says that Fusion employees have easily adapted to SAP technology. “Just about everybody in the company uses it, from production staff to executives,” she says. “Our managers have been very comfortable with the software, which is a main reason why it’s been so successful here.”
MULTIPLE BUSINESS BENEFITS Fusion has reaped many business benefits from SAP technology. For example, the company has become even more efficient because of SAP. “A key metric for us is being able to effectively manage relationships with our customers, and delivering equipment to the customer efficiently is critical,” says Mather. “SAP solutions have given us big benefits in this area – SAP functionalities are ideal for this part of our business. Our purchase-order process is faster and more efficient. The integration of our quotations and order taking has dramatically increased the accuracy and visibility of the process. Those are clear process improvements that we’ve seen.”
Fusion is using SAP’s variant configurator to take orders for custom equipment, and its use has delivered an unexpected benefit. “We have years of experience using a configurator, but we were not accustomed to having pricing drive off the configurator, and that’s a big improvement for us,” says Mather. According to Mather, the company’s legacy systems made pricing errors on about 30% of orders for Fusion’s configured systems. Using SAP technology, orders are now 100% accurate.
The company has seen other improvements as well. Shipping products on the scheduled ship date has been a long-standing metric for Fusion. “This year we’ve had a 5% improvement to over 96%, which is phenomenal,” says Mather. “And that is attributable to SAP because the scheduling functionality in SAP is far superior to what our prior system had. This clearly has business value for us.”
With SAP technology, month-end closing at Fusion is faster. Previously, on the last day of each month the company’s legacy systems closed for transactions at noon and the accounting staff performed month-end closing activities until 7:00 p.m. “With SAP, we make a clean cut-over at 5:00 p.m. on month-end close day and closing activities take place at the beginning of the next business day,” explains Mather. “This allows us to continue operations and reduces overtime.”
That benefit extends beyond accounting. “We’re also able to maintain our SAP environment with a very small staff,” says Mather. “Our business volume is growing, but we don’t need additional staff for IT, which is hard to believe given the complexity of the SAP software.”
LOOKING AHEAD Mather says that Fusion will continue to rely on SAP in the years ahead. Company executives are envisioning the role that the SAP NetWeaver™ platform will play in Fusion’s future. SAP NetWeaver is a comprehensive integration and application platform that works with a company’s existing IT landscape to enable and manage change. “SAP NetWeaver is a very different platform,” Mather says. “It’s a dynamic business application that is right for us because we’re in a dynamic business environment.”
SAP technology has fulfilled Fusion’s expectations. “Partnering with SAP for our business-systems software has worked very well for us,” concludes Mather, “primarily because the solution we chose has a lot of business functionality integrated into it. For a complex business like ours, SAP provides the functionality to address any and all business models that we might choose to undertake. That was very important to us.”
