Aptean Industrial Manufacturing ERP Case Study: The Phoenix Group

The Phoenix Group is comprised of three businesses that service manufacturing and retail companies across the world. The Phoenix Group, Inc. (TPG) provides engineered assembly services to the world’s best automotive and retail media industries.

Phoenix Material Management (PMM) provides material management, third-party logistics and returnable packaging management and cleaning services to the automotive industry.

And Phoenix of Texas, the newest division, provides complete logistics (both global and domestic), consolidation and project management support to the retail, oil, hotel and health care industries.

The Challenge

The Phoenix Group needed an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to manage its diverse products and services and 15 remote facilities and provide a web solution to remote users and customers.

Some of the challenges The Phoenix Group wanted to resolve:

• Manual data entry

• Duplicate data, leading to errors and significant delays

In the past, The Phoenix Group site managers and field representatives took customer orders on paper forms and entered them into spreadsheets. The information was later extracted and typed into the accounting system.

Bryce Durham, Director of Business Systems for The Phoenix Group commented, “The previous manual process required that data be entered multiple times, was prone to errors and only provided management information several weeks after the fact.”

The Solution

The Phoenix Group selected Aptean Industrial Manufacturing ERP because it provides all of the functionality needed to run every aspect of its businesses, including receiving, purchasing, inventory, materials resource planning, shop floor data collection, lot control and financial accounting. The software also provides a web solution to customers and remote users to place orders and review inventory, shipment and sales data.

Durham says that Aptean also offers excellent accounting functionality, “The key advantage of Aptean Industrial Manufacturing ERP from an accounting standpoint is that it is fully integrated with all of the other modules. This eliminates the time and potential for error that was involved in the summary entries that we had to make every month in the past.”

The Phoenix Group dedicated two teams to implement Aptean Industrial Manufacturing ERP at two of its businesses: PMM and PRM. The teams defined the business requirements and processes and mapped them to the software. The initial project covered two full financial companies, four operational tracking companies and over 2,500 SKUs. The overall process from purchase to production took about six months.

The Results

The new software and processes have substantially improved nearly every aspect of The Phoenix Group’s operation. For example, the company previously had a staff of five customer service representatives whose primary responsibility was to take orders from customers over the phone.

Now, The Phoenix Group uses Aptean Industrial Manufacturing ERP to provide each customer with a website, including a catalog that is customized to their needs. Customers can place orders that are automatically entered into the ERP system and also view shipping, invoice and payment information. As a result, only one customer service representative is now needed.

Leveraging Aptean ERP, The Phoenix Group was able to:

• Triple sales while adding only one administrative person

• Reduce inventory levels by $50 million

• Save approximately $80,000 per year in inventory write-offs

• Generate labor savings of $35,000 per year

The Phoenix Group receives hundreds of orders every day, and most create demand for purchased materials. In the past, administrators had to review each order, check inventory levels, and, if necessary, manually generate a purchase order.

Now, the material requirements planning functionality in Aptean Industrial Manufacturing ERP explores each order and aggregates demand for purchased supplies. The net requirements for purchased supplies are presented in the purchasing queue. The material requirements planning capabilities in the Aptean Industrial Manufacturing ERP have helped The Phoenix Group reduce inventory levels by $50 million and made it easy to adjust inventory thresholds in response to changing demand.

The Phoenix Group also used to spend hundreds of hours per month using spreadsheets for production scheduling. Aptean Industrial Manufacturing ERP job order queue has greatly simplified this process by aggregating demand and providing a list of products that need to be built. Schedulers can now generate a schedule by checking off boxes and generating work orders. As a result, the time required for scheduling has been reduced by 50%.

Ready To Reap Measurable Benefits With Aptean ERP?

Whether it’s optimizing processes to improve productivity and reduce expenses, or enhancing customer satisfaction and driving profitability, an industry-specific Aptean ERP delivers measurable benefits straight out of the box—helping you accelerate business growth.

What makes an Aptean ERP stand out? We specialize in purpose-built software designed to solve the unique challenges of your industry, and we have in-house experts in your sector. This means you don’t need time-consuming workarounds or costly customizations, and you can be up and running quickly without a complex implementation.

Want more information, pricing or to schedule a demonstration? Get in touch today, we’d love to chat.