RMD Metals is a diversified manufacturing and distribution group providing metal products for commercial, industrial, residential and building industries worldwide.

Within five months of installing and configuring the iQ4bis business intelligence solution, the company was able to reduce its aged inventory by more than 20%, some $2 million worth of stock. Another $2 million is expected to follow over the next 7 months.

“We knew we were overstocked in certain areas, but we couldn’t really get the necessary information to help us pinpoint exactly which products were overstocked," says Garry Vistarini, chief financial officer of RMD.

"With iQ4bis we were able to develop a process where we could track the age and location of our entire inventory and match inventory holdings with customer demand. Within months of initiating the programme we were able to bring our inventories down by $2 million without any reduction in delivery or service. We couldn’t have done it without iQ4bis.”

RMD, one of Australia’s largest manufacturers and distributors of specialist metal products, had been running the Syspro ERP system for almost a decade.

“We were very happy with Syspro as an ERP solution, but we couldn’t easily generate the type of analysis reports that we wanted," Vistarini explains.

"We had been able to get by with extracting data from the Syspro system into Microsoft Excel and then massaging the data. But this process was time consuming and not easy. In fact, it was such a hassle that we would avoid it if possible,” he says.

“We knew we needed to upgrade but didn’t quite know where to start. Then Syspro Victoria, our implementation partner, suggested we look at iQ4bis. We gave them a call and they were most receptive. It turned out that the team from iQ4bis Australia were looking for a Syspro-based organisation like ours wanting better reporting and analysis capabilities. They jumped at the chance to show us how well iQ4bis could merge into the Syspro environment,” he says.

“The iQ4bis people came to our headquarters and gave us a preliminary demonstration,” explains Vistarini. “We were suitably impressed and decided to go to the next level, a proof of concept demonstration."

“We see a lot of value-add when the customer chooses to go down the POC path,” says Curtis Williams, Business Development Manager at iQ4bis Australia.

“It provides us with the opportunity to prove to the customer that we can take their transactional data and build a cube to slice and dice within a few days. It also allows us to quickly get an idea of the quality of data we are working with. In this case we had already developed standard iQ4Bis / Syspro templates and procedures so the process of building the sales / inventory cube from their Syspro data was quick and easy. And when we showed the RMD management team their own data running on iQ4bis within such a short timeframe they were blown away.”

RMD Metals immediately made the decision to acquire iQ4bis Analysis Web, DataServer 2005 and associated services.

“We immediately saw that iQ4bis could solve our inventory challenge,” says Vistarini.

“While the iQ4bis templates were a good starting point, we had to add certain fields to our data sets in order to give us the results we needed. We had data on inventory counts, but not how long a particular item had been on the shelf. Once we had captured this information we were ready to roll.

“RMD knew exactly what they wanted to do and that always makes my job much easier," says Nico Smit, the iQ4bis consultant on the project.

"Previously, they had not tracked the relative age of a product, ie how long it had been in their warehouse. We developed a process where we could track products using product families and then drilling down through product classes into individual stock codes and then generate a month-by-month analysis. This way we could pinpoint where the major problems were. Once we put that information into the cube and combined it with the sales information from Syspro, RMD could start to see immediate patterns.

“All of a sudden we had visibility into our entire inventory, sales and distribution process,” says Vistarini.

“This gave us better information for planning our production schedules and allowed us to more closely manage our inventory. We could focus on moving our aged stock and avoid building up excess inventory in the future. Within just a few months we had reduced our stocks by some $2 million, freeing up resources as well as warehouse space. With these kinds of numbers, we can say that iQ4bis has been extremely cost-effective.”

Another benefit for RMD Metals has been an overall improvement in their database integrity. “Unfortunately we found that we had a number of incorrect fields in our records,” notes Vistarini.

“Previously it wasn’t an issue because we couldn’t use the information even if we had it. For instance, we hadn’t been updating the sales representative field in the customer master files and discovered this when running sales reports by salesperson. We had to tidy up our database correcting salesperson, geographic and product class codes But once we had it all in place we could better manage our resources.”

With the enhanced databases and the web based iQ4bis interface, the RMD sales team uses the system every day to manage their territory and customer base.

“Our sales people don’t even look at Syspro anymore,” says Vistarini. “They don’t have to. Everything they need – sales information, margins, inventory, availability – is just a few clicks away with iQ4bis.”

RMD Metals has been very happy with the professional services iQ4bis has provided.

“Nico has done an excellent job setting up our systems,” concludes Vistarini.

“By outsourcing the development work and concentrating on using the system, we have avoided having to bring on new people. Additionally we’ve needed only a minimum of formal user training. The iQ4bis interface is so logical that most users have become proficient in less than an hour. Considering price, performance and service, we are extremely happy with iQ4bis and how well it has integrated with our Syspro ERP solution.”

Click here to register for free iQ4Bis Proof of Concept

For more information contact

Asj Smith            
General Manager- APAC
iQ4bis Management Software Limited
+64 9 366 2635
Visit our website www.iQ4bis.com

October 2007