How Do Shoe Companies Polish "Fit" ERP To Break Through The Industry'S Difficulties?

When it comes to how to deal with the problems encountered by enterprises in the process of informatization, Zhang Yalin puts forward some opinions.

In production, shoemaking industry has the characteristics of labor intensive, product style, number of codes, single shoe order quantity and so on. In sales, the sales network covering the whole country often causes the market information feedback to lag behind.

Relying on information technology to solve these management difficulties, let golden monkey group out of a golden road.

"The members of our information center include: business personnel, technicians, electricians, entry personnel, and even carpenters."

Zhang Yalin, director of information center of golden monkey group, said: "our daily work is to ensure the normal operation of the entire network equipment and procedures, cooperate with the business departments to make good use of ERP, supervise, train and guide the operation of ERP, meet the IT needs of the grass-roots and leadership levels, and dig deep into the data independently."

Speaking of how to deal with the problems encountered by enterprises in the process of informatization, Zhang Yalin said: "the key is to identify the location of the IT department. We have identified the location of the information center in the whole enterprise as a service department serving all departments of the enterprise."

Founded in 1951, Weihai golden monkey Refco Group Ltd has 55 years of experience in shoes making and garment making. It is one of China's "old" shoes and garment enterprises. Now it has assets of more than 800 million yuan and more than 5000 employees. It mainly engaged in the production and sales of leather shoes, sports shoes, shoes, leather goods, clothing and other products, and involved in many fields such as import and export trade, real estate development, commerce, hotels, logistics and so on. Its comprehensive strength ranks among the top three in China's leather products industry. It is one of the vice director general units of China Leather Industry Association, one of Shandong's key enterprise groups and one of the largest industrial enterprises in the country.

In 2008, the Golden Monkey Group's goal was to produce 8 million pairs of leather shoes (including 2 million pairs of exports), to achieve sales income of 5 billion yuan; in 2009, sales revenue was 8 billion; in 2010, sales revenue was 10 billion.

To this end, accelerating the pace of information pformation has become one of the three reforms that the group is carrying out.

    突破行業之困

In order to adapt to the rapid change of season and style and personalized production demand, almost all of the footwear industry is facing the problems of product life cycle and production cycle shortening, duplication of labor between departments, material management costs too high, batch management difficulties, and information lag.

The production process of footwear industry is generally divided into sample development, business communication, procurement, warehousing, birth control, cutting, material preparation, needle truck, molding and finished product shipment.

The production capacity of a shoe factory mainly includes three aspects: production cycle, quality and cost.

As a result, the long cycle of information feedback and frequent changes in printing become the biggest pressure on shoe industry.

Discrete manufacturing, whether electronic, mechanical, clothing or textile, is almost invariably using the universal ERP.

However, each industry has its particularity. As a traditional manufacturing industry, the shoe making industry is characterized by labor intensive, low overall quality of managers, many styles of products, large numbers of codes, and small batch sizes of single shoes, making its production management a complex matter.

In the past, the shoemaking industry only used some small systems developed by itself to help manage inventory and procurement behavior. These systems were only simple imitation of manual work, and rarely improved business process improvement.

How to make the shoemaking enterprises make full use of the advanced management ideas of the mature ERP system, and to maximize the traditional business habits, become the key to the IT management of shoemaking industry.

Therefore, when choosing ERP system, we must pay attention to the production management characteristics of shoemaking industry.

"I think in the current situation, the next time to choose a good ERP product, it is better to practice internal strength to sort out the process, so that enterprises can make good use of ERP products."

Zhang Yalin thinks that although there are common faults in the footwear industry, the Golden Monkey Group has its own "pathological" characteristics.

Identify the root cause

As the leader of the shoemaking industry in the network, the Golden Monkey Group has a large sales terminal customer base. It has completely failed to adapt to the management needs under the new situation simply relying on the traditional information processing mode.

Information lag has brought many problems to enterprises: inventory is growing year by year; the distribution of stock products is uneven; the market with good sales is often out of stock, but the market stock backlog of bad sales does not know how to deal with it; the products sold in the market are sold back to the group, and after confirmation, production and unloading, the sales season has passed, and the number of dead households and bad debts has increased year by year.

"The fundamental reason for these problems is that enterprises can not get market information in time, sales management is backward, and sales information is lagging behind."

Zhang Yalin said.

The key to improving sales management is to speed up the feedback of daily operation information of each node on the sales network (business information includes sales volume, quantity of purchase, return quantity, price, variety specification, cost and so on).

When the market changes frequently, only by timely grasping the speed / sales ability and current inventory of the sales channel, can quickly calculate its replenishment needs, and arrange the replenishment and its related follow-up business processes at the first time, so as to ensure the maximum cargo potential of all sales channels, so as to improve sales capacity and utilization ratio while improving turnover speed.

Zhang Yalin resolutely pointed out that there were three urgent problems to solve at the time: first, the timely collection of market information, because of the wide variety of products and wide market, if we did not make use of effective network, we could not finish the work; two, the accuracy of warehouse management; the previous mode management did not reach the color, size and batch number of each item; many seasonal products delayed business opportunities because of inaccurate inventory and became the outdated products; three, the flexibility of price management, because the market spread across 32 provinces and municipalities throughout the country, unified price management was not conducive to flexible market management, and the change of the former product price management mode was imminent.

Since September 2006, the information center has reformed the original automated stereoscopic warehouse, and the distribution system supporting the automated stereoscopic warehouse is moving forward in an orderly manner. It will be completed by the end of June 2008.

"Relying on this system, we are going to build 500 self operated or joint chain stores in 2008, bringing the total number of stores to 2000.

It is estimated that after the implementation of the distribution system, the inventory of finished goods will be reduced by 40%, the market share will be increased by 5%, the cost will be reduced by 10%, and the capital turnover will be accelerated by 1 times in the whole year, resulting in a profit of more than 15 million yuan.

Zhang Yalin said.

IT and Business Alignment

Zhang Yalin's viewpoint is unique for ERP selection.

She believes that the current ERP products are basically functional enough, and the key is whether enterprises can fully use them.

"ERP products on the market are rarely targeted at the development of enterprise specific needs. At this time, it is more difficult to realize the personalized needs of enterprises.

Instead of choosing generic products, it is better to analyze personalized needs for their own enterprises and use ERP functions in enterprises.

For ERP manufacturers, ERP should not be bigger and bigger. We should modularize the software in the light of the more and more subdivided industry characteristics, and make the module division of software more and more detailed. We should launch suitable ERP products for each industry.

IT and business integration are the biggest challenges of enterprise CIO.

"The IT department should change its point of view and upgrade itself from the management of IT system to service management.

Neither can we ignore the development of business solely for the sake of IT stability, nor do we need to make long-term plans for IT simply for the sake of business development.

To achieve both management and service, IT and business can really merge together. The integration of IT is not only the maintenance of system and network, but also the application of business work, so that IT personnel must be familiar with business as business people, and at the same time have to lead business people as familiar as IT personnel.

The real meaning of the combination will make the system more perfect and more suitable for the needs of business development. "

According to Zhang Yalin, "the preliminary research on the ERP line is mainly carried out for the business department. At that time, we had some isolated small systems running. Because of the disunity of the information, a lot of business data had to be repeated many times, so the on-line ERP system has been strongly matched by the business departments, and we all hope to get rid of this repetitive work, so that we can operate less and audit more."

After the on-line application of the system, Zhang Yalin led the information center team to continue to improve and expand according to the development needs of the enterprise.

"For 4 years, both hardware and software are stable, maintainability is very good, the system's error warning function is perfect, every night will perform a lot of automatic detection function, help to find some wrong information.

The functions of the software are relatively perfect and the operation interface is relatively simple.

However, the scalability of the system is relatively poor, because the customization of the software is very special at that time, and the expansion interface in many places is not considered very well, which makes it difficult for external expansion.

Zhang Yalin said, "all the management of enterprises will be refined, and the development of group ERP will be our next goal of planning and development."

For the next step to achieve meticulous management and move towards the goal of group ERP, Zhang Yalin has a good idea: first, the management of enterprises is becoming more and more detailed, and the goal of informatization is becoming more and more specific. Under such circumstances, the original data collection input can no longer meet the needs of management, and we need to pform data to real-time acquisition.

To make every detail in the production process collect the most primitive data to meet the needs of data analysis in the whole ERP system; secondly, with the continuous development of collectivization and diversification, the ERP system of the independent subsidiary company should be integrated with the ERP system of the whole group, making it a complete large system, so as to facilitate the management of the whole group.