Every product Daniels Electronics manufactures is customised to the needs of its public safety customers. As a result, the company requires ERP software with strong inventory management capabilities to track the unique requirements of each customer order.
Its expanding customer base also led to a need for a unified and user-friendly system for tracking sales leads, customer orders, invoices and sales funnel reporting.
Based in Victoria, Daniels Electronics designs and manufactures radio communications equipment for specialised applications. The company's modern 30 000-sq ft manufacturing facility features in-house robotic surface mount manufacturing, automated production testing, digital RF design facilities, and SYSPRO Material Requirements Planning (MRP) and inventory control systems.
Since its inception in 1950, Daniels has built its reputation on extremely reliable and environmentally robust base stations, repeaters, paging and ground-to-air radio equipment. Its client base includes coast guard services, forest services, utilities, telephone companies, transportation agencies, fire departments and law enforcement agencies.
The bulk of Daniels' sales comes from US and Canadian government contracts at federal, state and provincial levels. As a General Services Agreement (GSA) Schedule qualified supplier, Daniels can sell product to any US government agency.
Tom Smith, Controller of Daniels Electronics, says: "Our product is unique because of the custom configuration required. No two systems we put together are the same."
In recent years, the complexity of Daniels' business has increased due to exponential sales growth and a gradual migration to a product line based on digital technology.
"When sales increased tenfold, we found that the manual processes we had in place were starting to fall apart. Our sales team used to write up their quotes in Excel or Word, and there was no link to SYSPRO. In addition, we have to report on our contracts, and we were doing that in a very manual fashion," Smith says.
Daniels Electronics has been using SYSPRO for approximately 14 years, originally implementing the base accounting modules, then slowly working up to the Inventory and MRP modules. Daniels' recent customisation of SYSPRO allows the company to track design and manufacturing details of every system it sells.
Daniels now uses SYSPRO's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) module, linked to the company's sales order quoting system, to manage its 26 000-customer data base. "We created a more customer-friendly invoicing and sales order tracking system," Smith says. "Now we can see and track the entire sales funnel, from enquiry to actual sale."
To further facilitate reporting requirements, the company is considering the adoption of SYSPRO Mobile, which would allow it to instantly update and control the movement of its inventory.
"We have considered far more expensive ERP products, but they didn't offer more than we already have, and SYSPRO has provided solutions to meet all our needs. In addition, we've always had excellent support from SYSPRO. Any time we've had a problem they've been there to get it fixed. They've helped bring us to the next level," Smith says.
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