Kirby Risk Eliminates Time Consuming Manual Process By Implementing Radley's iCARaS Automotive EDI

Background Information

The Kirby Risk Manufacturing Division manufactures and assembles products for off highway OEM manufacturers. They also design and assemble industrial control panels for automated assembly line applications, and produce their own line of Rotary Phase Converters and Electrical Power Factor Correction Capacitors under the ARCO Electric name. Kirby Risk frequently delivers to customers on a just-in-time basis and they sequence customer orders in their order of assembly. They are heavily reliant on EDI to receive customer orders and forecasts, as well as for sending ASN’s, invoices, and other documents to their customers.

Challenge

Kirby Risk faced increasing customer demands with regard to how they send and receive electronic data. They had little or no individual plant control of their EDI data or EDI related processes, and had several manual processes that they wished to automate.

Prior to the iCARaS implementation, Kirby Risk had customized many of their shipping related processes in order to make them faster and more user friendly. However, the customizations affected their ability to upgrade their application software without a tremendous amount of time and resources to do so. Kirby Risk needed a product that would allow them the flexibility and versatility to meet their customer’s needs while maintaining their ability to move forward with the product. In addition, they had very little control of their actual EDI data and transactions at the plant level. This caused the sales groups from each of the plants to be reliant on their centralized IT department, which resulted in longer turn around times for simple issues.

Kirby Risk was also in need of a quick and easy system in order to meet the schedule of nearly 200 shipments per day. And they did not want their shipping departments to use two separate systems for completing customer shipments. In addition, one of Kirby Risk's customers set up a web site to assist non-EDI suppliers with the entrance of shipment information. Unfortunately, all suppliers were getting lumped into this process, even the EDI capable ones.

Solution

Kirby Risk implemented iCARaS Automotive EDI, from Radley Corporation. The decision was based on their evaluation of the experience of Radley Corporation, their discussion with current Syteline/iCARaS customers, and the belief that iCARaS offered the widest array of options to meet their customer’s requirements.

Results

Since implementing iCARaS, the time consuming manual process of printing customer demand off of a web site and entering the demand into their ERP system manually was eliminated. Radley developed a solution for Kirby Risk that allowed for the download of the data from the web site into iCARaS, completely eliminating the manual process. To assist with Kirby Risk’s shipments, Radley worked with Syteline developers to come up with one solution that allowed for them to quickly and effortlessly meet the daily shipping schedules of their customers. In addition, they are able to schedule jobs and reports, and receive notification of failures. Radley also worked with the developers of the non-EDI suppliers shipment web site to create a solution that allows Kirby Risk to upload their ASN’s to this site automatically. With this enhancement it eliminated nearly three hours of manual entry and entry errors that resulted in lost revenue and shipping and invoice discrepancies. The Radley solution has also assisted the sales group. The ability to quickly respond when customers request a resend of an ASN or an invoice has helped tremendously. When Kirby Risk identified invoices that were not paid in their payment period, they would have to work with not only the customer but their corporate IT group to get the invoices resent. This additional communication resulted in extending their days sales outstanding to an unacceptable level. With the implementation of iCARaS, their sales groups can now work directly with customers to identify the problem invoices and re-transmit them as needed. This has resulted in a decrease of their days sales outstanding.

“The most important benefit that we received from the iCARaS product is our ability to fix things at the plant level that were previously done at a centralized corporate level,” notes, Brad Henderson, Kirby Risk’s Six Sigma Black Belt, “ The user interface is easy to use and understand and allows our users, who have direct contact with the customer, to answer questions and resolve problems in a timely manor.”

Henderson continues, “The biggest improvement that we have seen is in the turn around time to resolve customer issues. Our sales groups now have the tools that they need to answer EDI related questions or resolve problems such as resending an ASN or invoice that was not received by the customer. iCARaS and the Radley group have lived up to, and in many cases surpassed, our expectations. We have very few issues with the iCARaS product, and the Radley support team has been extremely responsive in answering our questions and fulfilling our requests.”