With Microsoft Business Solutions, customers do business their way

The order-management process at Lindab Inc., Stamford, Conn., is a testament to how well Microsoft Business Solutions enterprise software meets the needs of contemporary, small- and medium-size manufacturers.

Lindab is the North American business unit of a Swedish company that builds custom sheet-metal components for heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems. With Microsoft Business Solutions providing its enterprise software engine, Lindab has created a process through which instructions for how to build its parts travel from a customer’s desktop to the cutting and stamping machines on Lindab’s shop floor without human intervention.

“The Microsoft Business Solution development environment is based on open technology,” says Dwight Marcellus, Lindab’s MIS director. “That made it easy to do the customizations - and the integration with other applications - necessary to execute this order-management process.”

Finding an enterprise system with such inherent flexibility was crucial to Lindab because it does business in 22 different countries, which means that its customers not only employ many different software systems, but they speak numerous languages and trade in multiple currencies.

Lindab was sensitive to other issues as well, at the time it selected Microsoft Business Solutions. “We already had been through a failed - and quite costly - ERP implementation with another vendor that offers a bigger software package than we needed,” Marcellus says, adding, “so we were looking specifically for a midrange solution.

“This system clearly is oriented for small- and medium-size manufacturers,” Marcellus continues. “It also has all the capabilities to handle multiple currencies and the paperwork that go along with being an international company.”

But the final selling points for Lindab, according to Marcellus, were the solution’s manufacturing functionality and the open technology on which it was built. Those elements allowed Lindab to devise its new order-management process.

To create that process, Lindab built an extension to the configuration management program. “There are more than five billion possible configurations for duct work and fittings that we could build,” Marcellus says. “But we were able to build 200 basic items in the solution, along with a certain number of options for each one, to support most of our customer requirements.”

Customers start the ordering process by downloading a piece of software called CADvent from Lindab’s Web site. Marcellus says Lindab created this piece of freeware because it allows customers to configure products in the same design format that Lindab uses.

“The result is that HVAC professionals can simply and quickly create precise part design drawings,” Marcellus says. “And we don’t have to reengineer those drawings because we are getting them in the same configurations, and essentially the same design software that we use. It also speeds the quoting process because the CADvent software uses Lindab part numbers and creates a cost estimate before the drawings are transferred to our system.”

The real payoff comes once Lindab and its customer agree on a price. The order is transmitted to the ERP system, which parses out the appropriate data to the financial and purchasing systems while also sending the manufacturing instructions to the shop floor. “This has significantly lowered our costs and improved our customer service levels,” Marcellus says. “And that has given us a considerable competitive advantage.”

For more information on innovation from Microsoft Business Solutions,
go to www.microsoft.com/businesssolutions or call 1-888-477-7989 option 1

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