“At any point, we can look at our bill of materials, see our true costs, and have confidence that they’re accurate. So, if we need to respond quickly to a market opportunity, we always know where we stand. This ability helps us both win new business and make sure that it’s profitable new business.” Larry Bess Vice President of Marketing

Company Overview
Providing high quality products at competitive prices was the formula for success that secured MAXRAD, Inc. the top spot among providers of mobile communication antennas and related items. Today, the Hanover Park, Illinois-based manufacturer offers customers such as Cisco and 3Com speedy delivery of more than 8,000 catalog items.

“In whatever we do, we want to be viewed as the premier antenna supplier,” says Steve Deppe, chief executive officer. “In our mobile communications segment, we have established a long track record as a company that provides excellent quality products at fair prices.”

“Today, we’re building on that reputation as we enter the emerging market for wireless data communications,” Deppe says. “Every segment of this dynamic, fast-growing market requires antennas–whether it’s for wireless local area networks (WLANs), wireless Internet access, or wireless broadband connectivity. This is a market that’s growing rapidly, and we expect it will provide the greatest share of our business over the next several years.”

The Situation
For MAXRAD, boosting company performance to the next level by delivering products faster and with more accuracy isn’t easy. In part, that’s because it’s already so good. “In our established market business, we typically build and ship products in one to five days–depending on the order size. Lead times on many of our products are expressed in minutes. And our on-time delivery performance is consistently in excess of 98 percent,” says John Cosmas, chief financial officer.

What makes these metrics so outstanding is that they’ve all been achieved in an outsourced manufacturing environment consisting of approximately 150 suppliers. “We do all the design and development work here in Hanover Park,” says Cosmas. “Then, we do all the final assembly and testing here, so it’s critical that we maintain an uninterrupted supply of components hitting the back door just when we need them to meet our customers’ requirements.”

That’s easier said than done as MAXRAD’s global supplier network reaches from Illinois to Asia and dozens of sites in between. “One of our biggest challenges is managing a supply chain network that has such a very broad reach,” Deppe says. “In a way, we’re our own worst enemy here because we have consistently turned product around in a matter of days, even when lead times on some of those components can run two weeks to eight weeks–or more.”

“The challenge we face is balancing all these elements, in an outsourced environment, to meet the changing requirements of our customers,” he says. “To do that, we need visibility into every aspect of the process. We have some of the most demanding customers in the world. They expect high quality products, competitive prices and short lead times. They also expect visibility into what we’re doing here, and increasingly want visibility into what our contract manufacturers are doing for them.”

The Solution
After an exhaustive search, MAXRAD selected the Infor XA Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. “We talked to several Tier One players and a fair number of mid-size players before making our decision,” Cosmas says. “What we saw was that MAPICS (now Infor) had functionality that stacked up well against the larger ERP providers. Actually, we didn’t see much that the big vendors offered that MAPICS (now Infor) didn’t. And we felt more comfortable with MAPICS (now Infor) because of the company’s focus on the manufacturing market.”

Deppe recalled that even though the Tier One players put on a mid-market hat during the sales cycle, they still talked the big company talk. “They didn’t really have a lot of empathy for what we deal with on a daily basis,” he says. “Plus, there was also the matter of implementation cost. With any of the Tier One players, we felt that we’d have been saddled with implementation costs that, at a minimum, would have been two to three times what we incurred.”

As it turned out, the MAPICS (now Infor) implementation went very smoothly and very quickly. MAXRAD was up and running with the new solution in less than seven months. “We didn’t want to do this in stages,” Deppe says. “The new system had to have full functionality and full integration of all the modules right from the start–and it did.” Good planning coupled with good training made it possible to transition smoothly to the MAPICS (now Infor) solution over an extended weekend.

Real Results
“At any point, we can look at our bill of materials, see our true costs, and have confidence that they’re accurate. So, if we need to respond quickly to a market opportunity, we always know where we stand. This ability helps us both win new business and make sure that it’s profitable new business,” says Larry Bess, vice president of marketing.

While many companies look at an enterprise system to bolster sagging operational performance, MAXRAD isn’t one of them. Even before the MAPICS (now Infor) implementation, the company’s performance was already world-class. What MAXRAD sought from the new system was much more strategic.

“Sure, we can talk about incremental benefits in inventory turns and in on-time delivery, but that’s not what we expected from this system,” Deppe says. “The most tangible benefit we get from this system is that we look and function as a much bigger organization than we are. Without the MAPICS (now Infor) solution, I truly don’t think we’d have the same level of success with world-class players that we currently enjoy.”

MAXRAD’s distributor base also likes the company’s technology direction. “Our distributors are always looking for ways to reduce costs,” says Larry Bess. “With the MAPICS (now Infor) solution, we can offer direct system access–cutting time and paper from critical processes. For example, we can now automate the receiving function so that when they accept our shipment, we automatically receive a check. In early pilot projects with key distributors, we found this kind of capability definitely strengthens our position with them and provides us with a clear competitive advantage.”

With the MAPICS (now Infor) solution, MAXRAD has also made improvements to its internal business processes. For example, creating custom reports, a task that has eternally caused headaches for many ERP users, is now greatly simplified. The easy access to information helps MAXRAD respond quickly in good times and in bad. “We can now spot trends faster and react to them from a sales and marketing perspective,” Bess says. “It’s not just access to information that’s valuable, but what we can do with that information.”

The management team regularly accesses information from the MAPICS (now Infor) solution to monitor and track the performance of the organization. “We have instant availability of sales and gross profit by a variety of different dimensions,” Cosmas says. “We can track it by market, by region, by product, or by cluster of product.”

The same information is used to help improve the performance of MAXRAD distributors. “We extract performance reports for our distributors and show them exactly how they’re doing against previous periods and against their peer group,” he says. “This helps them understand what’s happening in time to take corrective action.”

“Using the information we provide, it’s easier for our partners to make informed decisions about which products they should buy more of and which they may want less of,” Cosmas says. “This is what we call a package of value-the combination of products and value–added services–that helps cement our relationship as one of their preferred vendors.”

In the high-growth sector where MAXRAD competes, nobody likes to think about slowdowns, but they do happen. Early in 2001, when the market began to slow, MAXRAD used information extracted from the MAPICS (now Infor) solution to monitor changes in the market and scale back its inventory pipeline by approximately 20 percent. While many other high-tech manufacturers got stuck carrying excess inventory, MAXRAD managed to synchronize slowing demand across its extended global supply chain.

Even in a slow-growth economy, the MAPICS (now Infor) solution has helped MAXRAD win new business. “At any point, we can look at our bill of materials, see our true costs, and have confidence that they’re accurate,” Bess says. “So, if we need to respond quickly to a market opportunity, we always know where we stand. This ability helps us both win new business and make sure that it’s profitable new business.”

All this is good news for MAXRAD, but it’s really just the start. As the company expands into the new wireless broadband and WLAN markets to provide seamless coverage to a demanding customer base, MAXRAD plans to roll out some of the Collaborative Components of the MAPICS (now Infor) solution. Complete with browser-based access to information across the supply chain and the promise of automating even more transactions over the Internet, MAPICS (now Infor) Collaborative Components will provide MAXRAD with the tools needed to fill orders rapidly and accurately while maintaining a high level of customer service.

In an era where it’s no longer enough to provide high quality products at a fair price, MAXRAD is well positioned to move to the next level. The company has the technology and the vision to become a value-added supplier in the truest sense of the word – for customers in both the mobile communications market and the new, wireless data communications market.

“What impresses distributors the most isn’t just what we can do today, but what the MAPICS (now Infor) solution will enable us to do tomorrow,” says Steve Deppe.