Dunlop Living is New Zealand’s leading polyurethane manufacturer. It makes high quality manufacture-to-order furniture products and has annual sales in excess of US$50 million. Since its implementation, the Lawson M3 system has become essential to the company’s ability to improve production controls and make business processes more visible and measurable.

Business benefits
Since implementing the Lawson M3 solution, Dunlop Living has reaped significant benefits across its New Zealand operations. The company has improved inventory controls, enabling more sophisticated planning and coordination across sales and purchasing, and dramatically reduced duplication of work across the business.

Huge product range
Dunlop Living is the leading manufacturer of polyurethane foam and upholstered furniture in New Zealand. Using Lawson M3 applications that cover CRM, purchasing, distribution, warehousing, inventory and financials has enabled Dunlop Living to address a number of key challenges that typically face manufacturing organizations.

“One of our challenges is the management of a large, very diverse number of product SKUs. Customers can choose one of hundreds of fabrics on furniture we produce. Also, as we are always developing new models and new fabrics, our processes would be completely unmanageable if these items were not configurable.

Lawson Product Configurator has become an invaluable part of our Lawson M3 suite in effectively managing our furniture SKUs,” says Peter Thorburn, the financial services manager at Dunlop Living.

“We also have to carefully plan production schedules around our many different product lines in order to achieve maximum efficiencies across the manufacturing process,” he adds. “At any one time we could be making items from sleeping bags and children’s furniture to hospital mattresses or pillows across our different factories.

Planning this can be very complex and time consuming.

Using Lawson Material Requirements Planning (MRP)capabilities, we can optimize these processes, planning and prioritizing further in advance, as well as better coordinating our purchasing with sales and production.

This can save considerable man hours while increasing the effectiveness of inventory management, reducing material lead times and product turnaround, and ultimately enhancing customer service and our bottom line,” says Thorburn. “MRP has allowed the whole business to become more visible and measurable.

“With the Lawson M3 solution now up and running smoothly, we have also abandoned almost all of our peripheral databases and spreadsheets — and in doing so, dramatically reduced duplication of work,” he continues.

Thorburn also points out the benefits of using Lawson M3 Business Performance Warehouse (BPW): the production of meaningful reports and better understanding of business performance.

“Because of the many rigorous checks and balances around internal consistency of data in the Lawson M3 System, which is then extracted to BPW, we have strong and very accurate business analysis capabilities. None of these benefits would have been achievable prior to implementing the Lawson solution,” continues Thorburn.

The company
Dunlop Living is the region’s leading polyurethane foam manufacturer, polyester fiber processor and polystyrene bean manufacturer. It is the largest manufacturer of upholstered furniture in New Zealand, and has more than 450 employees in its three manufacturing facilities, located in Auckland and Christchurch.

Why Lawson?
Previously, the company encountered growing frustration that its legacy system did not provide the level of integration it needed, and which required heavy modification to achieve business goals. It was no longer flexible enough to meet the company’s emerging business demands.

“We needed one source of information and one version of the truth. Investing in an ERP system seemed the logical choice, as it linked all facets of the business into one database and would automate a lot of previously manual
processes,” Thorburn says.

“We initially considered a large number of vendors, which was eventually narrowed to three: Lawson, Microsoft and GEAC.

The final decision came down to Lawson M3 and Microsoft Axapta,” he says. “We decided on Lawson because it was seen as a stable product with a promising global future.

The large-scale investment in Java that had already been undertaken to underpin the Lawson product also gave the Lawson M3 solution a jump on some of its competitors. It gave us more confidence as to the continuing development of the product without the prospect of radical change.

“In addition, the IBM iSeries server on which the Lawson M3 System runs has a reputation for being very robust, giving us confidence in the future reliability of our system,” Thorburn adds. Overall, Dunlop Living's impression of Lawson at the evaluation and design stages was that the company offered a powerful product and highly skilled consultants to take it successfully through implementation.

Implementation
Dunlop Living decided to take a “big bang approach” to its implementation — accomplishing it in a tight timeframe.

The rollout progressed on schedule, with a smooth transition to the new system and a successful go-live.

“Business pretty much continued as normal as orders continued to go out once we were live. Within 12 months, the initial bumps were ironed out and the system was operating effectively,” he confirms.

Thorburn says that the company’s focus was getting back to business as quickly as possible. Its key priority was ensuring that order taking, goods dispatch and customer invoice processes ran effectively; purchasing, manufacturing and planning were secondary priorities from the outset. In all, each element of the implementation was fully functional at go-live.

Future plans
Thorburn anticipates that the company’s plans will be two-fold: to cement the systems now in place in order to maximize further benefits, and to begin rolling out additional Lawson M3 modules.

“We are now starting to ramp up the returns of our investment and anticipate that in the next 12 to 24 months we will see significant savings in many areas of the business. We will also build on the current system to increase efficiencies in other areas of the business — including rollout of Lawson Multi-Site Planner to enable effective management of our various sites, and Lawson Forecasting and Demand Planner,” he says.





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