Electronics and telecommunications manufacturer and supplier improves back office efficiency with Codeless Platforms’ BPA Platform
Codeless Platforms today revealed that Jackson Industries, a manufacturer and supplier of telecommunication, electrical and electronic products, has improved its order processing, warehouse management, purchase order approvals and payment processing by using BPA Platform (formerly TaskCentre) to integrate its business systems and automate a range of processes.
Jackson Industries has been using SAP Business One for a number of years to manage its orders and finances. It also relies on a dedicated warehouse management system (.wms) to handle stock and distribution along with an EDI package (GXS BizLink) to handle communication with customers, which obviously require integration with SAP Business One.
“While the existing integrations with our SAP backend worked, they were starting to have throughput limitations and were becoming increasingly difficult to manage as everything had grown very organically with the business,” explained Thomas Jackson, Group Operations Manager, Jackson Industries. “The biggest issue that we had was around the ability to respond to changes. Whilst we were able to keep on top of the changes required, the implementation costs were very high, even for small amendments. Bringing these into Codeless Platforms’ BPA Platform has simplified our architecture significantly and improved maintainability.”
The EDI package (GXS BizLink) that Jackson Industries uses is instrumental in the running of its business. It has automated many processes surrounding its EDI solution as manually performing the tasks used to take up a huge amount of man hours. All sales orders are now imported from external sources (primarily GXS BizLink) into SAP Business One and order confirmations are exported from SAP Business One to the EDI package.
Furthermore, resulting invoices are synchronised between systems to eradicate unnecessary data entry. For customers with complex requirements, BPA Platform is also used to generate documents such as recurring sales orders.
“We trade electronically with the bulk of our customers, mainly using an EDI package to import orders and export confirmations and invoices,” said Jackson. “Over 90% of our transactions use some form of electronic link. It would be impossible for us to realistically trade without this in place.”
Jackson Industries also required its warehouse management system (.wms) to communicate with SAP Business One. Tasks have been created with BPA Platform to export jobs from SAP Business One to .wms. Once orders are shipped, job completion notifications are imported from the warehouse management system to SAP Business One.
“It is critical for our warehouse system to communicate with our SAP backend. Without this link in place, our warehouse would not be able to ship orders,” said Jackson.
Jackson Industries has also automated the importation of payment notifications from its credit card gateway. This has saved employee time and enabled the company to reallocate resources.
“While credit card payments made up a small fraction of the total payments received by the business, having this automation in place removes one small task from our finance team and allows them to focus their attention on other (more productive) tasks.”
Order processing is a significant aspect for Jackson Industries, along with the purchase order (PO) approval process. For any order raised an email is automatically sent to one of the designated approvers containing a link which they must click to approve. Automating both these business functions was fundamental to the company deploying automation.
BPA Platform has equipped Jackson Industries with a future-proof system, which can be used throughout the business, and made operations more efficient. The company can now employ BPA Platform for all its process requirements ensuring that changes can be swiftly implemented. For Jackson Industries, that’s what adds real value.
“We are now able to be more responsive to changes and we have the capability to scale our transaction volume well into the future without running into limitations,” said Jackson. “One benefit we’ve discovered is the ability to rapidly build tasks for one-off jobs such as bulk product renaming. We would previously do this by building a separate tool, which was time-consuming.”
About Jackson Industries
Founded in Australia in 1987, Jackson Industries is a manufacturer and supplier of electrical, electronic and telecommunication products to major retailers and other global companies, with operations in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China and Vietnam. There are more than 30 million Jackson products in use in Australia alone, with Jackson items stocked in over 18,000 retail stores throughout Australia. The company is meticulous when it comes to good design and quality, and it backs up its claim of everyday quality products, by offering a “lifetime warranty” on the products it sells.
About Codeless Platforms
Founded in 1999, Codeless Platforms is a highly experienced and trusted software company that develops data integration, business process automation and rapid application development solutions. Our two flexible, powerful platforms – BPA Platform and Applications Platform – enable organisations to take full control over their data as well as respond to the rapidly changing demands of business today.
Our knowledge of the marketplace and channel has grown in line with this development and established us as a highly experienced and reputable software company, working with partners and software vendors (Access, Infor, Microsoft, Sage and SAP) who have the confidence to invest in Codeless Platforms.
With over 450 global partners, more than 7500 customers use Codeless Platforms’ software solutions, ranging from diverse global organisations to the small local enterprise. The company is headquartered in Poole, UK, with representative offices throughout the world.
