Full speed ahead with new ERP system

The name Boesch Motorboote has an excellent reputation among boat owners and water sports enthusiasts worldwide. The Swiss company, founded in 1920 and rich in tradition, is one of the most renowned designers and builders of wooden sports boats and cruisers suitable for the coast. This is reflected, among other things, in the fact that several water-skiing world championships have been held with boats from Boesch and that the products from Lake Zurich are not only regarded as sports and leisure equipment, but even as long-term investments. The company also demonstrates its pioneering role in the development and use of groundbreaking concepts such as the bent rudder for optimum handling characteristics or the use of innovative coating materials. In order to expand its excellent market position, those responsible have now decided to implement the multi-project management ERP system ams.erp. The standard solution, tailored to the special requirements of batch size 1+, had been recommended by an external selection consultant and is designed to optimize project handling by providing up-to-the-minute data at any time.

Full power in a new system landscape

Until now, the Swiss manufacturer had been using two parallel software products with different focuses. On the one hand, there was a solution for financial accounting, working time recording and general project management, and on the other hand, an aging PPS software that had been strongly adapted to the processes at Boesch over time. The latter in particular was increasingly unable to meet the growing demands of customers and suppliers at all levels. "With our old system landscape, it was no longer possible to fully realize the shorter delivery and project times required today, especially against the background of increasingly customer-specific product requirements," says ERP project manager Marcel Stricker, describing the initial situation that led to the search for an ERP system.

Right at the beginning of the evaluation process, the Boesch managers approached an independent selection consultant with a catalog of requirements that was to provide them with a comprehensive overview of the system options under consideration and their pros and cons. It quickly became clear that in the future, the company would only work with an integrated overall solution instead of the dual solution used previously. After an initial overview of the available options as well as the resources likely to be required, the first step was to expand the software components used for project management, working time recording and financial accounting to include functionalities for materials management. To get a good comparison to other end-to-end systems, the consultant then brought ams.erp into play. The decision makers in the company followed his assessment that the software was best suited for the outlined area of application: "During the presentations and in the context of a preliminary project, the system quickly managed to convince us," confirms Marcel Stricker.

Savings in material setup times

The focus of ams.erp on make-to-order, contract and variant manufacturing played the decisive role. "The new system had to be able to flexibly map our enormous vertical range of manufacture, the many customer-related specialties and the many Boesch-specific items," adds the ERP expert. In this context, he describes the possibility of always being able to view all inventories and delivery dates on a daily basis and in real time in the future as one of the most important functional criteria for the decision in favor of ams.erp. Control rounds through the warehouse, which were previously necessary due to working with outdated data, will no longer be necessary in the future. In this context, he also considers the material shortage check integrated in ams.erp to be very important, which will now also take place on a daily basis and provide timely information about material shortages. The old system was only able to map the additional consumption of articles to a limited extent or with a delay.

On a process and business management level, the Swiss boat builders expect above all immense savings in material setup times as a result of the elimination of inventory checks during the year. In addition, it should be possible to massively optimize the recording of inventory stocks, so that the employees in the area of material and warehouse management will have more time for value-adding tasks as a result of the relief. A special organizational feature is that the new ERP system will also be used at the sister company Boesch Classic Boats Services AG. The main aim here is to coordinate the supply of materials via a central purchasing department.

Source and further information: http://www.ams-erp.com