NATIONAL GUARD PRODUCTS MODERNIZES ERP TO ACCOMMODATE RAPID GROWTH
WESTERN COMPUTER DEPLOYS MICROSOFT DYNAMICS 365 BUSINESS CENTRAL CLOUD TO STREAMLINE MANUFACTURING PROCESSES AND INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
THE SOLUTION
As National Guard Products (NGP) planned to expand its Memphis operations by opening a second manufacturing plant in Las Vegas, Director of IT Ali Syed knew it was the ideal opportunity to deploy a modern ERP platform. At the time, the Memphis facility relied on a legacy ERP system.
“It’s difficult to adapt to a new ERP system and new ways of manufacturing custom products,” Ali says. “Memphis was running efficiently because our team had been doing things for so long—but so much of the process was in their heads—and not in a scalable system. With Las Vegas coming online with a completely new staff, we felt it would be easier to start with a new ERP system there before transitioning the Memphis team.”
Specific manufacturing and warehouse functions Ali hoped to streamline included the bill of material process and inventory management. Each BOM would tell the manufacturing team what raw materials they need for each job and the precise process to produce the items. Inventory management makes sure enough raw materials are in stock to meet forecasted customer demands.
Given that NGP offers more than 20,000 products that can be customized in multiple ways, the effort to manage these functions has always required a lot of manual work. “We were using Excel spreadsheets for both processes,” Ali says. “To scale and accelerate manufacturing processes, we knew we needed to automate both functions. This would be particularly critical for new people who join the company and have not learned our complex manufacturing workflows.”
THE BENEFITS
Western Computer also proved its flexibility when Covid hit shortly after the implementation had begun and travel was restricted. NGP was not allowing anyone outside the company to enter the facility so the Western Computer team had to work remotely.
“This can be challenging because in manufacturing, it’s helpful to visually see how the process is done to understand how the ERP software needs to work,” Ali says. “But with the manufacturing expertise of the Western Computer team from past deployments, they were able to understand how we operate. Western Computer was diligent in communicating what they and we needed to know.”
For material resource planning, Ali can run reports in Business Central to forecast how much material NGP needs to purchase to fulfill customer orders. This functionality also helps resolve supply chain issues. “We’ve been able to keep a safe level of inventory without tying up too much capital,” Syed says.
Ali also appreciates the benefits of using a cloud solution like Dynamics 365. “We don’t have to worry about server uptime, the infrastructure, and backing up the data,” says Ali. “It’s all taken care of by Microsoft, which makes life a lot easier for our IT team. If something goes wrong, we know Microsoft will take care of it—even in the middle of the night.”
Another benefit for NGP comes from the integration of Business Central that Western Computer set up with Salesforce, the CRM platform. Western Computer configured APIs in Business Central so real-time data flows automatically between the two systems, which eliminates manual rekeying and eliminates input errors.