Established in 1974, Bailey Tanks started as a custom rotational moulding company and has grown to become the market leader in the transport and storage of liquids. Headquartered in Auckland, Bailey Tanks employs approximately 75 staff across its four sales offices in Australia and New Zealand, and three manufacturing plants in Auckland, Christchurch and Brisbane.

To better meet customer needs in the industrial, domestic and agricultural sectors, the company has diversified in the last few years to provide a “one-stop shop” solution for its customers with its comprehensive range of water tank and pump products, including accessories such as fittings, pipes, filter systems and valves.

Having built a strong brand of quality with steady growth over the past three decades, the severe droughts experienced in South Queensland, Australia in 2006 and 2007 provided a strategic growth catalyst for Bailey Tanks.

“Expanding into Australia was the obvious move, which incidentally delivered us straight into a growth opportunity. In 2006, the Queensland State Government announced state subsidies of $A1,000 for each household in the South East Queensland region for the purchase of water tanks to cope with the drought situation. Overnight, our sales skyrocketed, bringing our monthly transaction volume from approximately 300 in 2005 to 3000 in 2006,” said David Bailey, General Manager, Bailey Tanks.

Supporting the sudden growth of more than 10 fold in transaction volume proved to be an impossible task for its existing manual, disparate systems. These comprised of a standalone customer relationship management (CRM) solution, four separate accounting systems across its four sales offices and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets used for the manual planning of production and distribution schedules.

Due to the overwhelming response to the government initiative, the company faced a backlog of 6 months, which further compounded its difficulties with production planning, distribution scheduling and raw materials procurement. Most importantly, the situation made it nearly impossible for its staff to provide accurate delivery lead time information to their customers.

The desire to improve customer responsiveness and enhance overall customer experience drove the Bailey Tanks management to look into a scalable enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that would fully integrate its back-end processes and scale with the company in the future.

Solution
Bailey Tanks’ key criterion was to find a system that would scale with the company. “We wanted a solution that we could implement and just “forget about it” for the next 10 to 15 years. The system must be easy to use and will provide immediate relief to our staff in the short term,” said Bailey.

After evaluating several ERP systems available in the market, the Bailey Tanks management selected Microsoft Dynamics AX, due to its unique focus on manufacturing.

“During our evaluation, we found Microsoft Dynamics AX to be a tier above other systems. When compared with other ERP solutions which seemed more suitable for trading companies, Microsoft Dynamics AX came up tops in its comprehensive range of functionality that is easily customizable to meet the exact requirements of our manufacturing business. It is designed for all sizes of businesses with the ability to scale,” said Bailey.

Bailey Tanks implemented the Foundation Pack and Production modules from Microsoft Dynamics AX. With the help of Adaptable Solutions, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner, a Truck Scheduling Module was developed to enable more efficient distribution scheduling.

Thanks to the focused attention by its internal project team which worked well with Adaptable Solutions, the implementation was successfully completed within 4 months. The system went live in October 2007.

Benefits
With Microsoft Dynamics, Bailey Tanks successfully integrated its back-end operations to enhance production planning efficiency and centralise distribution scheduling. These improvements gave Bailey Tanks the capability to provide accurate delivery lead time information to their customers.

On average, Bailey Tanks maintains a production lead time of about two to three weeks. Due to the large capacities of its products such as the BT25000 and BT13500 tanks, Bailey Tanks practices build-to-order production for its larger volume products and build-tostock production for its smaller volume products in a mixed-mode environment.

With the dramatic rise in raw materials prices worldwide, the need to increase production planning efficiency to ensure optimum resource utilisation becomes a critical success factor for Bailey Tanks.

“Our production planning and distribution scheduling accuracies directly impact our entire supply chain efficiency and the ability to fulfil customer orders. Microsoft Dynamics gives us the capabilities to efficiently manage the entire production process from the sourcing of raw materials to the shipment of finished goods to customers,” said Bailey.

To enhance Bailey Tanks’ customer responsiveness, Adaptable Solutions also customised the system to enable the auto-emailing of sales documents such as sales order and sales despatch confirmations to customers directly from Microsoft Dynamics, without going through Microsoft Outlook. This speeds up the process and enables its staff to seamlessly communicate this information to their customers directly from Microsoft Dynamics.

“Most importantly, with Microsoft Dynamics, we are now able to provide more accurate lead time information to our customers, which enhances overall customer experience and improves customer satisfaction in the long run,” Bailey added.

The new system also helps to streamline Bailey Tanks’ accounting processes. Prior to Microsoft Dynamics, the disparate accounting software used at its four sales offices meant that much time was wasted during every month-end to manipulate the varied data into a centralised accounting system. Tedious data reentries and imports, with frequent reconciliation, were required to resolve the data inconsistencies often caused by human errors.

Overall business visibility has also been enhanced with a fully integrated Microsoft Dynamics system. At the operational level, manufacturing managers now enjoy visibility into other business functions, such as sales and distribution. This gives them a broader perspective into the business, which enables them to devise more effective plans for their areas of responsibility.

Confidence to grow
“With Microsoft Dynamics, we are assured that we have a system in place that will help us scale our processes comfortably to support future growth,” Bailey said.

“It is a relief to know that we can expand our operations without experiencing the usual growing pains.” With plans to “fully integrate everything”, Bailey Tanks is looking at replacing its existing CRM solution with CRM functionality from Microsoft Dynamics.

FOR MORE INFORMATION//

Adaptable Solutions
www.adaptable.co.nz
Ph 09 523 2405
dynamics@adaptable.co.nz

Microsoft Dynamics
www.microsoft.co.nz/dynamics
askdynz@microsoft.com