Ultra Finishing Limited, based in the UK, is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bathroom products. Because Ultra Finishing Ltd has control over their supply chain, they are able to deliver exceptional quality and value to trade partners.
Like many companies Ultra Finishing had multiple in-house developed solutions that became costly and time consuming to maintain. This influenced the decision the company made to move to the SAP platform and in 2015 Ultra Finishing went live with SAP. This led to new challenges; SAP SD is powerful but customer service was suffering due to the complexity of making changes and providing support. To address these challenges the decision was made to build an order management solution outside of SAP utilizing .net.
A local IT consulting firm was contracted to build a solution. The process involved many iterations and the cost to build continued to rise. Nick Masserella, Ultra Finishing’s IT Director sums up the process: “The internally developed and then externally sourced solutions failed to deliver the efficiencies we were looking for in our SD Solution, so rather than continually waste valuable development resource trying to bring the solution up to specification we looked for a system that would be flexible and comprehensive enough to handle our internal order processes and customer online requirements.”
Ultra Finishing was introduced to DataXstream in 2017. After some discovery and a reverse demo by Ultra Finishing, DataXstream introduced OMS+ the Order Management Solution developed specifically for SAP customers. OMS+ was the preferred and approved solution because it is built on SAP, utilizing the stable ECC core while providing the benefits of an SAP cloud platform application. DataXstream sent a small, efficient team to Ultra Finishing to support the installation process. Masserella said “SAP Cloud Platform was implemented, OMS+ was installed and Ultra Finishing was transacting in hours.” To clarify, DataXstream’s team was on site in Februrary of 2018, go-live was April 2018. The process to implement SAP Cloud Platform requires approximately a week for paperwork and a day for implementation. OMS+ installation requires a day and by end of business customers should be transacting. After OMS+ is installed an additional 4 to 5 weeks is spent on details specific to the customer.
Ultra Finishing describes the implementation as “eventless” and reports that the Customer Service Representatives are happy and being effective. OMS+ supports CRS through increased visibility to a customer’s history and product availability, a common need in manufacturing and wholesale distribution.
Every installation offers the opportunity for DataXstream to fine tune the process. When asked what “lessons learned” that they could share, DataXstream’s team answered that they have implemented Jira Service Desk for future projects. This is to ensure that requirements and tasks are collected in a system and it enables the team to quickly create a solution for customer specific project requirements. DataXstream complimented Ultra Finishing for their interest in reworking sale processes to seek efficiency. “The temptation is to lift and shift your sales process but implementing a new solution offers the customer the opportunity to rework the sales process and Ultra Finishing chose to work towards a simplified solution from a pure SAP SD perspective.” Said Tim Yates of DataXstream.
Ultra Finishing is now Roxor Group and they have provided the following data metrics to update us on their success with OMS+
- 15% increase in sales attributed to the ease of use of OMS+ in 2019
- 25% increase in customer satisfaction metrics after implementing OMS+
- 50% reduction in in house systems support costs
- 40% increase in regards to order input speed and accuracy
“2020 turned out to be our highest grossing year to date and having OMS+ certainly contributed” IT Director, Roxor Group
