Luna Nameplate Industries (LNI) is a specialist manufacturer of nameplates and labels.
Founded in 1970, the company creates badges, self-adhesive labels, graphic panels and membrane switches. The company’s products adorn cars, industrial machinery, whitegoods, electronic devices and many other products.
Badges and nameplates come in a surprising variety of styles and are affixed to myriad surfaces.
LNI therefore provides a diverse service that covers design and manufacture.
Strong competition and a need to innovate:
LNI faces many significant challenges. LNI operates in a competitive industry, China’s entry to the market means LNI faces heavy pressure to compete against imported products on price.
Customers want the same quality at a lower price. And they want LNI to deliver even shorter lead times.
Australia’s car-makers experience similar pressure and, as they are important LNI clients, the contraction of that industry is a further concern.
LNI exports, so is negatively affected by the high Australian Dollar. So LNI is now building markets in the USA.
Volatility of exchange rates are another concern, as they affect the company’s purchasing plans. LNI import 70% of its materials, but mostly pay in Australian dollars. Even when the AUD rate is high, imports do not seem to get cheaper.
Complicating matters further was the company’s previous IT system, a blend of applications intended for use by small business that lacked integration and critically, were unreliable.
LNI’s systems were becoming redundant and unsupportable, they did not meet LNI’s current or future needs and we saw we had to standardise on one united system instead of continuing to operate several applications.
That desire for change became urgent when the company’s data became corrupted.
Why Vantage?
Luna Nameplates selected Vantage and Cogita as the source of its replacement infrastructure for several reasons.
Cogita ’s values were in concert with Luna’s, and the Vantage package came close to meeting its criteria.
More importantly, however, LNI quickly developed confidence that Cogita and Vantage would get the job done.
LNI is impressed that the demonstration it saw was made by a team and not just by individuals. When the presentations we saw also came from the team LNI had absolute faith that the combination would get the job done.
That job had six key performance indicators (KPIs):
- Integration of all operations
- Reduction in use of personalized spreadsheets
- Maximise the WOW factor
- Complete system acceptance from users
- Enhanced employee satisfaction/morale
- Ready access to key business performance indicators
Benefits:
LNI now uses Vantage to oversee all areas of its operations and credits the software, and Cogita’s implementation and consultancy services, as having made several significant contributions to the company.
Vantage has increased the flexibility of LNI’s work force by making it easier to train people to do the work and to schedule jobs.
Increased control:
Every manager has much more ownership and control of their department, because with Vantage, they can design and monitor reports to suite whatever is needed.
Improved time to market:
Vantage has also helped LNI become a more responsive company.
LNI has reduced turnaround time from quote to delivery from three weeks standard to between zero and two weeks.
LNI has also reduced lead times and shortened its reporting time frames. That has helped to improve scheduling and schedule accuracy.
Enhanced product development:
Another benefit of the new application is the ability to assess the profitability of new products.
LNI can now cost new products before it makes them. LNI can test things out before it introduces the product to the market. And if it wants to analyse the status of a product LNI can pull out fine details using Vantage.
Improved inventory control and accuracy:
Vantage has also given LNI greater control over its inventory of raw materials.
The Future:
LNI plans to continue to explore other contributions Vantage can make to the company.
Vantage will help LNI with its review of business model end to end. LNI now has good experience of the application; it knows how to use the system and can easily extract information.
Now LNI is talking about service oriented architectures and the need for greater web collaboration for its team in different cities.