Daktronics Looking to Score with New ERP System

Scoreboard manufacturer shoots for enterprise-wide visibility, shortened cycle times with new resource planning system

Scoreboard manufacturer shoots for enterprise-wide visibility, shortened cycle times with new resource planning system

El Segundo, CA — January 15, 2004 — Electronics manufacturer Daktronics has migrated to an integrated, extended enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution from Glovia International in a bid to achieve enterprise-wide visibility and shortened cycle times to improve customer service and financial control.

Daktronics is the leading manufacturer of electronic scoreboards and display systems, selling its products to customers ranging from schools and professional sports venues to businesses and transportation systems. The company is headquartered in Brookings, S.D.

Utilizing the capabilities of Glovia's glovia.com solution, Daktronics can plan and execute aggressive engineer-to-order and make-to-order customer response times, according to Glovia.

Key to this is the real-time, enterprise-wide parts tracking capability of glovia.com, allowing Daktronics to schedule projects and track costs through full integration of engineering items, inventory, customer orders and accounting, from original order through service. This is critical for companies, like Daktronics, that serve both large and small customers for the life of the product, with engineer-to-order, make-to-order and make-to-stock options, Glovia asserted.

"With glovia.com, we've improved our visibility and have been able to streamline operations to deliver critical on-site dates for our customers, often with lead times that our competitors decline to offer," said Carla Gatzke, enterprise information system manager for Daktronics. "In fact, this fiscal year we are shipping standard orders an average of two days before the customer promise date."

Daktronics' product design/manufacturing is divided into two broad areas: standard products and technical contracting. Standard products include, for example, various scoreboards used in high school gyms. Technical contracting covers custom projects such as professional stadium scoreboards and "light murals" for clients such as Lehman Brothers. In many ways, technical contracting projects resemble construction projects, with project managers, engineering drawings, subcontractors and installation supervisors all part of the mix.

As Daktronics evaluated ERP solutions, one requirement held special importance — the solution chosen had to handle both technical contracting and standard manufacturing. The enterprise-wide visibility glovia.com affords when it comes to tracking parts availability has proven to be a significant advantage for Daktronics, allowing the company to maintain a smooth manufacturing schedule.

"Using glovia.com, we can see across all customer orders — standard products and technical contracting projects— and see exactly what parts are required and how many," says Gatzke. "Before they become actual problems, we quickly identify potential part shortages and the customer orders that would be affected. We then can determine how long it will take for delivery of these parts and readjust our manufacturing schedule to minimize negative impact. With glovia.com, we're able to make these kinds of business critical determinations with confidence."

On the project management side, glovia.com capabilities have streamlined Daktronics' engineering process to the point where a designer can initiate a custom design in the morning and, by day's end, have ready a project work order. This, coupled with the efficiencies allowed by real-time, enterprise-wide parts tracking, has enabled Daktronics to meet its customers' demanding lead times.

In addition to insisting that the ERP solution it selected handle both technical contracting and standard manufacturing, Daktronics demanded that the solution meet another key requirement: It had to meet technical contracting's unique project accounting needs. glovia.com's accounting capabilities include percent-complete accounting, which is the ability to calculate monthly costs on a technical contracting project as a percentage of the project's estimated costs, then calculate that same percent of the purchase price as revenue.

"Because Daktronics is so heavily involved in technical contracting, we must be able to perform percent-complete accounting," says Gatzke. "Not every ERP solution handles percent-complete accounting, but Glovia does, which is vital to Daktronics' successful operation."

Glovia is a subsidiary of Fujitsu Limited.

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