Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Sometimes to get an idea of the value of CRM, ERP and such products, it's useful to revisit an installation more than six weeks after installation, and see if, long-term, the benefits are there. It's far too easy in this business to fixate on short-term ROI.

 

Five years ago, CDC Software, a wholly-owned subsidiary of CDC Corporation and a provider of CRM and other enterprise software applications and business services, implemented for Hong Kong Maxim's Group, a beverage and catering company in Hong Kong the CDC Software's Ross Enterprise Applications at its entire plant network.

 

Founded in 1956, Hong Kong Maxim's Group employs more than 14,000 people and serves more than 540,000 customers per day in more than 640 restaurants, outlets and catering operations, three factories and a printing plant.

 

Hong Kong Maxim's Group has also established joint venture companies with Starbucks Coffee International, and has Starbucks stores in Hong Kong, Macau, South and South West China.

 

Lacking an enterprise software infrastructure, the firm tracked and analyzed data manually which made product costing, recipe management and regulatory compliance inefficient, company officials say. The firm CDC Software's Ross Enterprise was chosen as an ERP system to address those operational challenges.

 

"Ross ERP offered the best overall value in terms of functional fit and low cost," said Alfred Kam, head of information technology, Hong Kong Maxim's Group. "On top of that, we saw how it could meet our needs with little or no customization."

 

"We now know what it costs to make every product and we also know how profitable each product is for us," Kam said. "The impact has been felt across our organization. For example, our marketing team can now make better decisions regarding promotions in order to drive sales and market share on select products."

 

Since going live on the system in 2003, the company has doubled its recipes to more than 800. Other improvements since the implementation include improved production planning and reduced waste by tracking daily orders through the system, a streamlined product introduction that enables the company to test and adjust new recipes in a controlled environment without having to bring the product to the shop floor, and a more efficient regulatory compliance process, company officials say.

 

"Considering the growth we've experienced over the last six years, regulatory compliance would have been a much more costly and involved endeavor with our previous manual processes," said Kam.

 

A couple weeks ago, CDC Software announced the introduction of Ross Enterprise v6.3, which company officials describe as a new version release of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) product.

 

Ross ERP now offers CDC Software's Smart Client technology with a thin client graphical user interface.

 

The product, according to company officials, offers "improved access and integration to the Microsoft desktop," so users can extract data from Ross ERP with familiar Microsoft Office products. The product is being pitched "from an IT support perspective," claiming "a lower total cost of ownership through centralized system administration, minimized deployment costs and reduced maintenance requirements when installing system upgrades."

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