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e-Business in the chemical, rubber and plastics industryManagement (CRM) system to deal with information flows between the manufacturingplant and sales offices, the company’s ability to respond quickly and accurately tocustomer needs was challenged.5.7.2 e-Business activitiesThe challengeDealing with multiple sales offices with the previous system was time-consuming, andproviding comparative reporting between business units was difficult and slow. Anyprocess requiring data to and/or from sales offices necessitated a number of phone-calls,e-mails and faxes to the respective parties. Besides, there were also concerns about theconsistency of data since practices differed from site to site. Standardisation of processeswas non-existent, and paper-based CRM not only was cumbersome and resourcehungry,but also constricted the enterprise-wide decision-making and reduced internalefficiency.Against this background, Toly figured out the following scenario: If users could share, useand rely on a central system, administrative time and costs could be reduced,management reporting made easier, and most importantly customer service performanceimproved. Toly decided that the most efficient solution was to establish a commonplatform and provide a vehicle to bring all sales-office information flows to a single focalpoint.A need for standardised information flowsSince they were already using Lotus Notes and Domino for e-mail and calendaringpurposes, the idea was that of building a central Lotus Domino database which could beaccessed across the group network. The Toly Products team engaged Intertek, an IBMbusiness partner, to consider the design and implementation of a centralised CRMsolution for use across its sales offices operations. The aim was to introducestandardised information flows and to enable an audit trail of all correspondence to and/orfrom different sales offices.The IT department at Toly Products worked hand-in-hand with the various departmentsconcerned to come up with standardised templates for regular queries, received at theMalta plant from the various sales offices, on the part of customers. Regular queriesincluded sales orders and enquiries, project quotation requests, complaints, and samplerequests. It was made sure that these standardised templates included all the necessaryfields so that there would be no waste of time in obtaining missing information. Designrequirements were defined in 2000 and this was followed by development testing andend-user training. The system was up and running in 2001.How the system works – the business processSales orders and enquiries are the much sought after information by sales offices.Following this development, sales offices would send the completed one-page salesorder or enquiry template by e-mail through Lotus Notes. This would include basic detailssuch as the name of the customer, the product code, the order quantity, as well as fromwhich sales office and the date in which the template has been issued. The productdescription is uploaded as soon as the product code is inputted. Sales offices also have173
e-Business in the chemical, rubber and plastics industrythe facility to insert the manufacturing tolerance of the ordered quantity, that is, themaximum acceptable variance in percentage terms.Once the customer’s name and sales office fields are entered into the template, thecustomer’s invoice address and shipping invoice address are uploaded into the templaterespectively. This is because Toly Malta does not simply forward the ordered products tothe sales offices, but it rather invoices the sales offices at cost-price to cover all expensesfrom their end and then it would be the sales offices which mark-up the price, sell the finalproduct to the customer and eventually make a profit. In the Commercial Details sectionof the template, the price at which the product will be sold to the sales office, and theprice at which the sales office would be selling the product to the customer, will beinputted by the particular sales office, in the Buy field and Sell field respectively. Thesefields are inputted after checking the costings data previously prepared by the productionsales order processing officer.In the Production Schedule of the template, the sales office would put forward a DeliveryRequest indicating the week number it would preferably receive the order, and thequantity of that particular order it would like to receive by that week. The productionscheduling department would then see whether it can manage to deliver the order by thatparticular week. If no slot is found, they would try to schedule the order at the earliestpossible date.Once a delivery date is established, the purchasing department would check rawmaterialsavailability. During this process a red button would appear next to the FactoryProposal (a field just below the Delivery Request received by the sales office) indicatingthat Toly Malta is still working on the order request and cannot give any feedback at thatstage. When a consensus between the production scheduling department and thepurchasing department is found, Toly Malta would input the Factory Proposal onto thetemplate indicating by when the order would be delivered and the quantity at that stage.The red button next to the Factory Proposal would instantly turn into a green buttonindicating that Toly Malta has provided its feedback on the delivery request. It would bethen the sales office, on the part of the customer, that decides whether to proceed withthe factory proposal or otherwise.Toly Malta has also invested in a custom-made Microsoft Access and VB.net ERPapplications using an SQL Back-end Database called WISDOM. This consists of variousinterrelated modules that include operations management, logistics and quality assurancemodules. As to sales orders, through the Lotus Notes Sales Order Importer module, thesystem imports data from the Lotus Notes database every hour. WISDOM, through theNavision Accounts Package Importer module, gives the facility to invoice as well as issuethe sales offices with a customer invoice by e-mail once the sales order is imported in thedatabase. This is still undergoing the test phase however, and currently has only beenintroduced between Toly Malta and the UK sales office.The system also allows for the automatic generation of credit notes to sales offices whenthere are short shipments for a particular week. The process by which Toly Maltaschedules production is still done manually using a number of Excel spreadsheets.However, work is currently being done on introducing a Production Planning module inthe WISDOM database so that when orders are received this module automatically findsa slot for the production of such order request. Following this development, customerservice will be improved further.174
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