GPX International Tire Corp.

GPX accelerates business growth with Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV

GPX International Tire Corp. is a multinational distributor of specialty off-the-road tires for the agricultural, construction, materials handling and transportation industries. The company experienced several mergers and acquisitions in recent years and was saddled with multiple IT systems. In order to streamline operations and improve the decision-making process, GPX needed a less-complex method to access its inventory and business data. GPX implemented Microsoft Dynamics® NAV to enhance its management and accounting processes. Today, GPX is using Dynamics NAV to standardize its operations on a common technology platform – helping to improve inventory tracking and make more informed business decisions in real-time.

Situation
GPX International Tire Corp. was created in 2005 through the merger of two North American tire companies, and has become a multinational distributor of specialty “off-the-road” tires for the agricultural, construction and transportation industries.

With roots dating back to 1922, the company has always relied on innovative technology to maintain its market edge. Over the years GPX has inherited multiple, legacy enterprise resource planning software solutions through mergers and acquisitions, forcing staff to engage in time-consuming, manual workarounds. For example, to process a tire product shipment, orders were downloaded into a spreadsheet and a manual delivery schedule was created. But with product data housed in different systems, it was difficult for GPX staff to determine if inventory information in each spreadsheet was accurate and up to date. With limited visibility into stock, GPX often stored up to a month’s worth of product inventory in order to avoid shortages during production runs. This added unnecessary business costs and required a growing amount of time and resources to manage.

In addition, staff used disparate budgeting, analysis and reporting tools that lacked integration, leading to concerns around data entry and duplication, and creating an IT environment that was growing more expensive to maintain and support.

“We had limited visibility into what was stocked in our warehouse. Sometimes we found ourselves shipping stock to one warehouse when another warehouse actually needed that product for a customer order, costing us valuable time and money. Making better business decisions definitely depended on us improving our technology environment,” says Wayne Shi, IT Director, GPX Tire.

Solution
To strengthen its competitiveness, GPX sought to improve efficiency through greater levels of automation. The company also wanted to streamline its inventory processes and enable its people to make faster and more informed business decisions.

After investigating several different ERP solutions, GPX determined that migrating to Microsoft® Dynamics® NAV would be the best fit for its business needs. Dynamics NAV is a scalable and flexible business management solution that offered GPX the best opportunity to consolidate data residing in its legacy IT systems. Dynamics NAV also features an intuitive work environment that looks and feels like familiar Microsoft-based software, including the 2007 Office system – minimizing training costs and helping staff at GPX learn the new system faster.

The out-of-the-box functionality was a key selling point for GPX. The company wanted to customize to the solution to immediately improve its order-entry processes and the flexibility of Dynamics NAV to meet these technology needs was huge.

GPX is using Dynamics NAV to help reduce complexity in its manufacturing and warehouse distribution processes by integrating financial, supply chain and customer relationship management information across the organization into one repository.

With Dynamics NAV in place, warehouse staff at GPX now know in advance exactly what has to be shipped to fulfill an order. Salespeople can instantly see what’s coming in a particular shipment and give customers a more accurate delivery date estimate. In addition, the purchasing team has deeper insight into factory production and are better able to track inventory demands, while the accounting department now knows exactly the status of accounts receivable and accounts payable can better track invoices and delivery times.

“Dynamics NAV really helps us better plan our day-to-day process, which is essential for us. The platform was easy to customize and configure, and scales easily to support our changing needs,” says Shi.

Benefits
With the adoption of Microsoft Dynamics NAV, GPX has a standardized financial management system that extends across its North American operations. The solution seamlessly integrates with the organization’s existing IT systems and delivers an efficient and robust accounting solution that helps to increase staff productivity and ease inventory management.

Greater business efficiency
From the accounting department to the warehouse floor, reports are now automatically generated and staff have real-time access to inventory and financial information. This helps GPX employees make faster and informed decisions around budgets and financial planning. Administrative staff can also share financial data and perform important transactions in real-time.

“With Dynamic NAV, we can access more accurate and transparent tire inventory data, which helps us to streamline our warehouse operations. This helps us to adapt business processes to accommodate changing workload and customer requirements on the fly, and we can now implement better strategies to meet changing capacity demands,” says Shi.

Improved productivity
With Dynamics NAV in place, tire-order information only needs to be entered once, saving GPX staff hours in duplicate data-entry time. Once entered, the information is immediately available to everyone who needs it, which means that GPX also avoids time-consuming batch jobs – further boosting staff productivity.

“We manage multiple warehouses and it is crucial that we know our tire inventory counts at all times. Dynamics NAV helps us to achieve this by reducing our paper-based processes and helping us make better pricing decisions through better insight into our materials and costs. Inventory look-ups and pricing for customers is a breeze and always right there in real-time,” says Shi.

Foundation for growth
Standardizing on a common platform has helped optimize business operations and, in the process, eased IT support requests. Today, the IT department is able to focus more on new projects and prepare the company for continued growth.

“With greater visibility into our operations, we’re using the Dynamics NAV platform to quickly identify processes that could be changed to operate more efficiently and profitably. Streamlining our operations with real-time decision-making has had a definite positive impact on our bottom line,” says Shi.