Case Studies

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Management Consulting

Engineering Consulting

ERP Services

Software Development / System Integration

Maintenance and Operations (M&O)

Client: Bluebird Corporation, Macon Georgia.

Client’s Core Business: Bluebird Corporation is one of the leading manufacturers of school buses and recreational vehicles.

Problem Statement: Quote to Production time is very high, which was impacting delivery time, inventory and demand management.

Business Impact:

Losing the market share due to production delays.
Inventory carrying cost was very high.
Operational costs were high and impacting the gross margin and the finished product cost.
Impact on company’s brand image.

Agelix’s Approach:

We took a phase approach to resolve the issues, a brief on the approach is mentioned below:

Phase 1: Finding the bottleneck in the end to end process (Quote to Build).
Phase 2: Process Automation, automating few of the processes(below-mwntioned) to improvise the turn around time

Quote Process
Product Configurator
Body and Seat Plan
Linking to CAD for Blueprint design with the ERP

Objectives Achieved:

Reduced the production throughput time from 30 days to 5 days.
Reduced inventory carrying cost by over $100 million dollar in 2 years.
Production capacity was increased by 17%.
The operating cost was reduced by 11.2%.

Client: Lanco Holding Group, Homewood, IL

Client’s Core Business: Manufacturing, Service, Sales and Distribution, Sports and Entertainment. The group has strong presence in the market and is growing by acquiring new business.

Problem Statement: The internal IT skill set, process and infrastructure was not aligned with the business goals and was affecting the day-to-day business operations. The stakeholders were worried about their internal IT business unit to support their growing business.

Business Impact:

High operational cost.
High dependency on external contractors.
Collaboration and information transparency was missing.
There were multiple project redundancies between the various business unit.
Process standardization was missing.
Industry standard process and technology was missing.
Unstable business application due to lower reliability and availability, which was impacting day-to-day operations.

Agelix’s Approach:

Setup the goal of the stakeholder.
Current state analysis and verification by following method:

Interview three level of management at each business unit.
Process simulation and benchmarking with similar domain data.
Internal resource skill set analysis and internal learning and development.
Procurement and vendor consolidation.
Nature of helpdesk tickets and turnaround time.

The roadmap for the TO-BE State aligned with the business goals was defined.
Analyze the gap between AS-IS and TO-BE State.

Objective Achieved:

Submitted the comprehensive report with the gaps in the process, people and technology.

Client: Major Healthcare provider (Due to agreement the name is not disclosed)

Client’s Core Business: Healthcare

Problem Statement: The client was spending on employee benefits higher than the industry standards, but still the employee turnover was high and productivity was low.

Business Impact:

Low productivity
Dependency on the outside contractor was very high
High operating cost
Low reliability

Agelix’s Approach:

Benchmarking with the similar domains, with regards to employee turnover, employee benefits and financial remuneration, work life balance evaluation, work environment, ethnicity and employee distribution.
Employee sentiments analysis.
Employee behavioral pattern.
Trend analysis.

Objectives Achieved:

Provided comprehensive report with root cause analysis.
Ranked the benefits in the order of highest to lowest impact on the employee.
Provided a predictive model for alerting the behavior of critical employee so that the preventive action can be taken to avoid the separation of critical employee.

Client: Mi-Jack Corporation

Client’s Core Business: Manufacturing, Sales and Distribution

Problem Statement: MiJack hired an ERP Vendor for company wide ERP migration/ implementation to support their growing business. For two years the implementation was going on with out any visibility to stakeholders. MiJack’s stakeholders decided to engage Agelix to assess the situation and then continue with the implementation.

Impact on Business:

Business had to continue using the outdated legacy system with shortage of business functionality.
Maintenance of the legacy system was very high.
Some of the major business functions were executed manually as legacy system was not supporting these functions, such as forecasting, budgeting, field services etc.
The engaged vendor cost was very high, which was impacting operational cost.
The knowledge of the legacy system was limited to few old employee, which was breaking point with regards to business continuity.

Agelix’s Approach:

Root cause analysis.
Business process mapping and and the deviation from the industry standards.
Reducing the customization from 367 to 21 by changing the business process close to industry standard and mitigated the risk by the training to use on industry standards.
Mapped and integrated existing external systems for required operational data.

E-Procurement
Storefront
Mobile field service
Menu driven tool to generate the report without the involvement of internal IT teams.

Objectives Achieved:

Close to industry standard implementation with minimum customization.
Within 9 months we completed end to end implementation and went live.
Complete data migration from the legacy system to new ERP system and decommissioned the legacy systems and saved the maintenance cost on legacy system.
Third party software such as DocuSign is integrated, data from third party CRM and Saleslogix is migrated to ERP and the yearly license cost of the software was saved.

Client: Broderson Manufacturing

Client’s Core Business: Manufacturing of equipment

Problem Statement: Brodersons' customers wanted to order the parts of the Broderson’s equipments via a third-party named Smart Equipment. The challenges are to provide the pictorial view of the parts of the equipment to the customer to order right parts and the integration between Broderson and the Smart Equipment system to receive the requisition and process the order.

Impact on business:

The customers were finding difficulties to recognize the exact parts number to order due to which multiple requisition for the same parts used to be received from the customers.
Parts’ sales revenue was low due to the above constraint. The only way the customer used to order parts is via fax or over the phone.
Due to manual operation the human error was high.

Agelix’s Approach:

The Agelix team developed a program to scan the equipment manual and generated the xml file consumed by smart equipment system to generate the pictorial view of the parts.
Agelix’s team automated the process by integrated Broderson ERP system with the Smart Equipment System using SOA architecture to receive the parts requisition and process the order without manual intervention.

Objectives Achieved:

Human capital expenses for the parts sales was reduced considerably.
The parts sales went up and the forecasting was accurate to optimize the stock.
Customer satisfaction rating went up.

Client: Lanco Holding Group, Homewood, IL

Client’s Core Business: Manufacturing, Service, Sales and Distribution, Sports and Entertainment. The group has strong presence in the market and is growing by acquiring new business.

Problem Statement: Lanco was looking to outsource their Information Technology to an outside vendor to manage it for a year to streamline and optimize the process. Another goal was to make their internal resources prepared for future expansions. Every business unit was maintaining its own system due to which the core business was getting affected and the operational cost was very high.

Agelix’s Approach:

Teams first approach was to find the root cause and address the bottlenecks for smooth day to day operations.
Optimize the operations to meet the agreed SLA.
Consolidation of the application and hardware.
Optimized the workforce.
Implemented the Industry standard ITIL process and methodology.
Companywide collaboration and transparency by forming the Governance and steering committee.
Modernize the legacy application and got rid of hardware and maintenance costs.
Established knowledge management practice by enhancing Zendesk to capture additional meta-data for each support ticket. In addition to this, we refined existing metadata to capture additional details.
Proactive approach by established maintenance plans for all primary applications by establishing the maintenance process and procedure.

Objectives Achieved:

Saved the operational costs by approximately $600k.
100% business continuity achieved.
Implementation of IT and Data Governing Body and Steering committee.
Aligned IT delivery with the business goal and requirements and helped the organization achieve its goal.
Implementation of Industry standard process, tool and technique such as Change Control Management, Continuous Improvement Plan.
Streamline the IT help desk process.
Achieved the SLA for IT help desk ticket by streamlining the process and establishing the accountability.
Created a feedback system for getting feedback from the business users and used these feedbacks for the improvement plan.
Transparency and collaboration between the business unit and created the path for the business unit to contribute to Continuous Improvement Plan.

Client: Mi-Jack Corporation

Client’s Core Business: Manufacturing

Problem Statement: MiJack's internal engineering team designed the RT crane for railway yard. They wanted a third party to provide FEA analysis before the production starts.

Agelix's Approach:

Agelix along with its partner L&T India simulated the condition and analyzed the below parameters:

Skidding Point
Impact analysis
Safety
Pulley Wheel Friction and Heat transfer
Payload oscillation/displacement
Rope Tensile Strength

Objectives Achieved:

Provided detailed analysis of the equipment in static as well as in motion.
Provided animated simulation of the equipment characteristics at different position of the pulley while in motion.

Client: Tico Manufacturing

Client’s Core Business: Manufacturing of tractors and equipment for terminal services

Problem Statement: Migration of Microsoft Dynamics to Epicor 10 on cloud.

Agelix's Approach:

Business process mapping.
Data migration using ETL.
Design the product configurator.
Optimized the procurement process, forecasting and Inventory carrying cost.
Optimized the Quote to Production Process.

Objectives Achieved:

Tico manufacturing went live in 7 months with an end to end implementation.
Provided training to the in house resources to be self-sufficient.

Client: Webco Manufacturing

Client’s Core Business: Manufacturing, Casting and Forging

Problem Statement: Webco was using Costimator to calculate the cost and send the quotes to the customers. The customer has to enter the data from Epicor manually in the ERP to generate the sales order. The process was tedious and erroneous.

Business Impact:

Admin cost was high due to erroneous data and manual correction.
The productivity was low.

Agelix’s Approach:

Agelix automated the end to end process using SOA Architecture.
Provided the user interface to verify and control the processing in case of any exception.

Objectives achieved:

Webco replaced 7 admins with the automation developed by Agelix team.
There is zero error tolerance of the data.

Client: Pacifica Solutions. A retail seller of online beauty products.

Project: Epicor Product Integration

Problem Statement: Client with an Epicor 10 implementation for managing their supply chain workflow decided to migrate their web store presence to the Shopify platform (http://shopify.com). The Shopify platform allows the creation of an online webstore and management of sales and fulfillment of products within this store. This management is done using a set of REST API calls. The client wanted to integrate the Epicor platform with operations such as inventory management and customer fulfillment details.

Agelix's Approach:

Agelix worked with the client to analyze their needs and determine what tools and libraries they currently had access to. Instead of building a new extension point, it was determined that the least intrusive approach was to extend the existing script library to invoke the necessary REST API calls on Shopify.

This extension library for the invocation was termed: Shopify C# Wrapper and designed to support integration of any client with Shopify.

The wrapper library was built in C# and allows data to flow bi-directionally to/ from Epicor. Input for the wrapper invocation is data extracted from Epicor and passed into the wrapper script as execution arguments. The output from each execution is preserved in SQL Server for later data feed into Epicor. To optimize the functional speed of the application, the C# Futures API was used to multi-thread the data load process.

Objective Achieved:

The client was pleased with the library implementation as it helped automate what would surely have been several hours of daily data entry and removed the possibility of inventory or fulfillment errors through such a manual process.