Dunham-Bush Holdings has deployed Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to improve its operational efficiency.

It’s web-browser base interface requires no client software be installed on the workstations.

The Rawang-based manufacturer of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning equipment uses EnterpriseOne to improve its sales inquiry response time and to streamline interaction between its engineering and production department, and its sales department to improve customer response time.

“The key challenge in Dunham-Bush is probably the 40% of its products which are engineered to order (ie. custom designed and built) ,” said Su Sing King, general manager of Sunway Business Applications, the Oracle Certified Advantage Partner which implemented the system for Dunham-Bush.

“With J.D. Edwards Product Data Management and in particular the Product Configurator, we simplify the integration between the sales, costing and engineering departments which constantly need to create, re-create, modify and update the costed bill of materials whenever there are new requests for quotation,” Su added.

“The new ERP development will facilitate the capturing and sharing of manufacturing information, the management and improvement of operations,” said Vladislav Safyanovskiy, Dunham-Bush executive director of Information Management and Decision Support.

“As we go along the phases of this project, we will increase our potential, improve further our existing infrastructure and architecture of modern facilities and products, and make new discoveries that will allow us to further enhance and innovate, bringing tangible benefits as a result,” Safyanovskiy added.

Prior to its investment in the solution, Dunham-Bush’s operations depended on physical documents moving across various departments but EnterpriseOne has no improved its communications and streamlined its business processes and auditing throughout the organisation by reducing errors and it has increased the speed of its information flow through automation.

EnterpriseOne also consolidated its customer data into a single, enterprise-wide view across all business operations, while the streamlined business proceses have also maximized the availability of its machinery (ie. its uptime) for productive use.

Besides Rawang, Dunham-Bush also has manufacturing operations in China, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Sunset industry?

Now isn’t heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) a sunset industry as claimed by many of those "pundits" and "futurists" of the information and services industry -- or more accurately, liars and charlatans of the dis-information technology industry -- who wrote about the "future" of information and services in their paperbacks which were then read by gullible management types, gullible government decision makers, gullible IT journalists and so on since the 1970s?

“HVAC is certainly not a sunset industry and information technology is the main engine which drives HVAC,” said Safyanovskiy.
 
“On the contrary, the survival of the manufacturing industry requires that they be more competitive and serve their customers better,” said K. Raman, Oracle Corporation Malaysia managing director.

“The outlook is optimistic in the Malaysian market and information technology can help reduce costs in many industries. Many of our customers are looking at best practices and there’s more interest in best practices in customer relationship management (CRM) from the financial services sector, and in the consolidation of information technology infrastructure,” Raman added.