The Reliance Bearing & Gear Co. Ltd
Greater visibility of branch operations for Reliance Bearing with Microsoft Dynamics NAV
The Reliance Bearing and Gear Company exclusively represents many world-leading manufacturers of engineering products such as bearings, pulleys and chains in the Irish market. Founded in 1923, the Irish-owned company sells its products to customers ranging from small local businesses to large multinationals.
Since the early 1990s, Reliance Bearing had been using an ERP package called ComPlete to handle its finance and distribution. However, the package lacked the features needed to integrate it with the company’s email or to be used as the basis for an e-commerce system – both increasingly necessary parts of any forward-thinking firm.
By the latter part of the 2000s, the product’s makers had stopped developing it further: the green-screen based system was no longer fit for purpose. Reliance Bearings team realised it needed a platform that could adapt to changing needs of the business, including better warehouse management, remote order capture via mobile devices and sales management.
We know we have a platform for growth and future development, thanks to ProStrategy.
Reliance Bearing
Eddie Cagney, Finance Director
Greater visibility of branch operations for Reliance Bearing with Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
Upgrading its ERP solution would also allow Reliance Bearing to meet several other business goals, such as offering promotional pricing to existing customers on certain product lines, as well as helping the company to plan its distribution processes more effectively.
A new ERP solution would allow management to analyse how the business was performing in greater detail. Reliance Bearing also saw an opportunity to simplify its IT management. “We wanted to centralise everything from a server point of view in our head office in Cork. We wouldn’t have any in-house dedicated IT people so the new solution needed to be simple to maintain.”
Goals: Strong financials and improved margin control.
Stock is critical to Reliance Bearings business and there is a strong replenishment model within Microsoft Dynamics NAV, which enabled the company to categorise its stock.
Build & Implement: Since Dynamics NAV has been in place, Reliance Bearing can close off its accounts much faster – often within two to three days after month end.
Transform & Grow: Enhanced working capital and better stock profiling.
The Solution
Cagney is very satisfied with implementation of Dynamics NAV and the improvements it has helped to bring about in Reliance Bearings business. “It’s a very powerful tool. You can extract a lot of customised information and you need something like Jet Reports to drill into such a large database as well.
We have about 23,000 stock records: to handle that level of volume, you need a good system. We’re very happy with what it’s currently doing for us, and we know we have the platform for growth and future development as well. We have plans to continually improve it, and ProStrategy have the capability to develop, modify and amend it for us as needs be, so we’re not confined to what came out of the box, by any means.”
Reliance Bearing is already planning to add features to Dynamics NAV, to further help its business. These include control of miscellaneous non-stock items, an e-commerce portal and a warehouse management system that incorporates barcoding. “We know that NAV can support those, which would have been one of the key issues at the outset. We haven’t experienced any limiting factors in terms of what we want to do.”
Solution Statistics
3081
Staff members using solution
27
Partners made this year
50%
Improvement on reporting