How a supplier ensures that you never run out of stock

 A just-in-time inventory management program allows Pan San Hardware to keep track of a customer's warehouse. By TAN EE SZE

Look at any machine, and chances are some of the nuts and bolts are from Pan Sun Hardware. Established in 1982 - one of the larg­est distributors of fasteners such as riv­ets, nuts, screws, washers, and circlips in Singapore - wants to grow even more as it expands its business beyond local shores.

And it is turning to enterprise re­source planning (ERP) software to rev up its end-to-end supply and inventory man­agement for customers here and abroad.

In its sales office at King George's Av­enue and in a separate warehouse in Ka­Hang Way, its stocks are piled neatly in boxes stacked up from floor to ceiling. The inventory includes more than 20,000 different fasteners.

In addition, Pan Sun manufactures complex fasteners and parts made to cus­tomers' requirements. Its clients include players in the semi-conductor, hard disk drive, construction and marine industries as well as direct manufacturers who pro­duce their own parts.

PHOTO: HUMPHREY HO

With its new Consignment Warehouse system, Pan Sun receives an automatic notification if the customers' stock levels are low and can replenish them. The project team included (from left) Ms Emerlin Toh, director of Ygl Convergence; Ms Chiew Ping Ping, administration manager of Pan Sun, Mr Zeng Liang, general manager of Kingdee and Ms Susanna Lim, sales manager of Pan Sun.

To cater to regional customers, it has set up factories in Suzhou, China, and Kaoshiung, Taiwan, as well as offices in Shanghai and Bangkok.

"Our aim is to increase our exposure in the Asia Pacific," said its general man­ager Mary Tay, "and to be a market lead­er, we cannot just sell parts; we must pro­vide solutions."

For its customers, running into an out-of-stock situation results in costly downtime.

To address this, Pan Sun is deploying a just-in-time Consignment Warehouse system which will enable it to monitor stock levels in a customer's warehouse, receive an automatic notification if the stock buffer is low, and replenish the stock even before the customer realises it.

The Consignment Warehouse is part of Pan Sun's deployment of the supply chain management module of Kingdee K/3, an ERP solution which went live last month. The system is being implemented by Kingdee's partner, Ygl Convergence.

Kingdee K/3 also supports 2D barcod­ing. Unlike traditional barcodes which capture only the identification number of a particular part, 2D barcodes capture in­formation such as the product's serial, batch and model numbers, and even us­age details such as which customer a par­ticular package is to be sent to.

Also up for deployment is a finance module. This will allow its management in Singapore to access data from other of­fices and create reports without having to hire a software developer to do the job.

Listing some of the factors that SMEs should consider in assessing an ERP solu­tion, Ms Cindy Sim, director, research and consulting, AMI Partners Access Markets International Partners, said that the solutions should be those that can be rolled out across many companies and plants, and can support several curren­cies and languages, including the local language of the country which the SME wishes to expand in.

The first phase of the Kingdee imple­mentation - the deployment of the fi­nance and supply chain management modules - cost "under $100,000" and took about three months to complete. - Tan Ee Sze is a freelance writer.