Regulatory changes have altered the face of the hot water supply industry in Australia. Stringent new state-based regulations have resulted in requirements for new technology and solutions that are more greenhouse gas efficient. Complying with legislation has meant a dramatically increased product range for Dux Hot Water, and an increasing level of complexity in its production processes.

“We used to have a simpler business structure with a narrower product range, and managing those processes was relatively easy,” says Les Patterson, the company’s general manager.

“However, as a result of our own growth and emerging regulatory demands, we have more than tripled our finished goods products and increased complexity in the manufacturing process. For example, previously we might produce water tanks with heating elements. Today we also manufacture tanks with solar collectors and sophisticated electronics driving the whole system. That increases pressure on our back end production processes,” Patterson says.

“It's important that we stay on the ball in such a competitive industry, and with all the changes happening, ensuring highly efficient management of areas such as production planning, stock control and supply chain execution was vital. We needed a technology environment that could support our evolving needs and this is where Lawson M3 came in.”

Improvement strategy
In 2003 Dux Hot Water decided the time was ripe to migrate its home-grown legacy system to the Lawson M3 enterprise suite. The selection formed part of a decision by its parent organisation, GWA International, to roll out the solution progressively across its entire group.

Since implementing M3, Dux Hot Water has not only addressed its primary driver to ensure business continuity, but has also supported its additional requirement to establish improvement strategies across its operations. 

“With capabilities such as advanced planning, inventory management, sales and marketing management, M3 has helped us achieve many goals, including increasing flexibility in our manufacturing processes and reducing stock, as well enhancing our communications and services for customers,” says Patterson.

“Today we have far greater visibility and accuracy of information and operational performance across the organisation. This just wasn’t possible with our previous, disparate legacy applications. We knew that without a more modern technology infrastructure and better integration of information, we were going to start running into issues,” he says.

“For instance, it would have been necessary to add significantly more people to our business to manage the older applications, raising potential cost issues and difficulties in finding the right skilled resources. Data integrity problems were also starting to creep in due to integration issues - which would only have increased.

“Establishing M3 when we did meant we could continue to optimise our business processes and increase production efficiencies, whilst complying with industry requirements, avoiding cost increases and ultimately minimising risk to the business.”

The company
Dux water heaters have been heating water for Australians since 1915, when the Middleton family decided on the name Dux, meaning best, for its new range of electric water heaters for showers and baths.

By 1940, their company, Dux Heaters Pty Limited, had developed its first instantaneous water heater, a ceramic unit. In 1960 it added copper roof tanks to its range, which then covered bath and shower heaters, instantaneous bath and shower heaters and instantaneous water heaters.

Today Dux is a leading provider of a comprehensive range of gas, electric, solar and heat pump water heaters for domestic and commercial applications alike. 

While the company has grown substantially since those early days, the words of that original motto still apply. Today as part of the GWA International Limited group of household brand names including Caroma, Sebel, Dorf Clark and Rover, Dux is marketed throughout Australia and overseas.

Why Lawson?
Dux Hot Water evaluated a number of enterprise products as part of an independent review in 2002.

It selected Lawson M3 based on the strength and flexibility of the product, ease of use, and extensive degree of integration and navigational capabilities. In particular, Lawson’s approach to open standards Java technology was seen to offer a technology platform capable of cost-effectively supporting future business requirements.

Dux also valued the strong relationship and trust built with Lawson consultants.

As a result of the original Dux Hot Water review and subsequent evaluation by GWA International, an agreement was formed that planned for GWA to progressively replace its existing legacy systems with the M3 suite across the group’s various businesses.

The implementation
Dux Hot Water has been live with its M3 system since July 2005 following a successful implementation.

“Some of the key success factors for us included a rigorous scoping of the project, ensuring we did a lot of work before the positioning phase, conducting daily project team meetings and avoiding any unnecessary complexities in the system,” says Patterson.

“It was important for us to keep it simple and avoid any unnecessary modifications. We didn’t want to try to re-engineer the whole process and decided that additional requirements could be addressed in subsequent stages.” 

September 2007