Luna Nameplate Industries (LNI) is a specialist manufacturer of nameplates and labels.

Founded in 1970, the company creates badges, self-adhesive labels, graphic panels and membrane switches.

The company's products adorn cars, industrial machinery, whitegoods, electronic devices and many other products.

Customers want top quality designs from LNI. The best looking badge is useless if it doesn't stick - so LNI are also experts in adhesives.

Strong competition and a need to innovate

"We operate in a very competitive industry," says Roger Bourne, the company's CEO. "China's entry to the market means we face very heavy pressure to compete against imported products on price."

"Our systems were becoming redundant and unsupportable," Bourne recalls. "They did not meet our current or future needs and we saw we had to standardise on one united system instead of continuing to operate several applications."

Why Vantage?

 "We were very impressed that the demonstration we saw was made by a team and not just by individuals. We had absolute faith that the combination would get the job done."

That job, Bourne says, had six key performance indicators (KPIs):

• Integration of all operations
• Reduction in use of personalised spreadsheets
• Maximise the WOW factor
• Complete system acceptance from users
• Enhanced employee satisfaction/morale
• Ready access to key business performance indicators

Benefits

LNI now uses Vantage to oversee all areas of its operations and credits the software, and COGITA's implementation and consultancy services, as having made several significant contributions to the company.

"We have achieved every KPI," Bourne said. "The system has definitely paid for itself. We have eliminated extensive overtime from our purchasing, estimating and scheduling departments and also achieved more effective outputs."

"There have been big transformations. We are tracking jobs' progress, which helps scheduling on floor and productivity. That means improved customer service because our sales people have the information they need to keep customers up to date."

"Vantage has increased the flexibility of our work force by making it easier to train people to do the work and also to schedule jobs.

Increased Control
Every manager has much more ownership and control of their department, because with Vantage, they can design and monitor reports to suit what ever they need to see.

Improved time to market
Vantage has also helped LNI become a more responsive company. "We have reduced turnaround time from quote to delivery from three weeks standard to between zero and two weeks," Bourne said, a reduction of at least a week.
"We have also reduced lead times and shortened our reporting time frames. That has helped to improve scheduling and schedule accuracy."

Enhanced product development
Another benefit of the new application is the ability to assess the profitability of new products.
"We can now cost new products before we make them," Bourne says. "We can test things out before we introduce the product to the market. And if we want to analyse the status of a product we can pull out fine details using Vantage."

Improved inventory control and accuracy
Vantage has also given LNI greater control over its inventory of raw materials. "It means everything is not only in the purchasing manager's mind. Status of our materials is now visible, can be scrutinized and better forecast for long term supply. This has reduced emergency airfreight costs and meant a big reduction in stress!"

"Now we are talking about Service Oriented Architectures and the need for greater web collaboration for our team in different cities."

"We know we can do it with Vantage."