Malaysian tile maker looks to ERP to improve efficiency, support growth

Malaysian tile manufacturer Feruni Ceramiche has selected the next-generation Epicor enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite, to increase efficiency and to support growth.

Feruni Ceramiche operates out of six sites across Malaysia, with plans to expand its operations both in Malaysia and globally. With the company experiencing double digit growth year-on-year, management began the search for an ERP system that would support continued growth and expansion while increasing efficiency across their multi-site operations.

Gidget Lim, director and general manager of operations for Feruni Ceramiche, said they chose Epicor because tjey wanted to change our system. “Second, we want to increase our efficiency and enhance our quality of service, including our service levels to end users, and Epicor improves our access to customer data and information,” said Lim. “Thirdly, we wanted to plan for future growth. Today’s implementation is only a start. We want to continue to work together with Epicor in the future with scalable expansion and look to increase the functionality leveraged from the system. We are proud to be using Epicor now and as our business continues to grow.”

The flexibility of the solution and the technology architecture Epicor ERP is built on played an important role in Feruni Ceramiche’s decision. “There were a number of areas during the process where Epicor stood out,” said Lim. “The ability to customize the technology was critical to our decision making. Analytics was also an important element of the system and the analytics dashboards, business intelligence (BI) and data analysis made Epicor stand out from the others. Additionally, analytics are built into the Epicor system. If we had chosen another vendor we would have needed to include the analytical functionality separately, on top of the system.”

One of the main advantages Feruni Ceramiche’s saw with choosing Epicor was the flexibility within the licensing model, Lim explains, “We liked the flexibility of the concurrent-user licensing model as opposed to an end-user licensing model. We are continuing to grow and expand and the flexibility of concurrent-licensing means our part-time and casual workers can share licensing. We did a pricing comparison with the vendors shortlisted and we decided to stick with Epicor based on the licensing model.”

This story first appeared in SMBWorld Asia.