CIE Components in Electronics
Trojan, a company that provides multichannel etail sales and fulfilment, electronic manufacturing and asset recovery through refurbishment and recoup, has made a six figure investment to develop its own unique warehouse management system (WMS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, which will result in significant growth to the company”s turnover over the next three years.
Since moving to its new location during spring 2015, a new, purpose built 180,000 sq. ft. facility in Kings Dock, Swansea, Trojan has been developing the industry leading WMS and ERP solution, to provide the necessary soft controls and reporting that Trojan”s increasing operations demand. Both the WMS and ERP tools that have now been deployed have been developed by the company, which holds the IP to the software.
With the new physical infrastructure and the WMS/ERP solution now online, Trojan will be able to continue to provide its clients with the superior services they require, whilst on-boarding new business. Although there are many WMS and ERP solutions available on the market, no product can provide the solutions needed by Trojan, leading the company to develop its own to enable it to significantly increase turnover through the comprehensive MIS.
Clive Murphy, managing director of Trojan, said: “Whilst off-the-shelf products exist, a yearlong search in which tens of software houses were contacted and engaged with, didn”t uncover solutions close enough to what we needed. We could have decided to on-board a few of the core products we trialled, further developing the products to suit our rigorous requirements, but that would have entailed a period of considerable expenditure, both in terms of cash and time.
“After weighing this up with third parties with whom we had little or no previous working experience, we decided the way forward was to build our own solutions in-house, leveraging our experience with what we”ve done before for other business units.”
Trojan”s WMS is more fully featured than any other similar product available on the market.
With clients from sectors including FMCG, healthcare and medicine, clothing and electronics, many different stocking requirements exist at Trojan. For example, the company is routinely asked to apply a FEFO (first expired first out) picking logic for medicines and for electronics, a FIFO (first in first out) system.
Trojan needed the ability to provide these different stocking requirements on a sku (stock keeping unit) by sku and customer by customer basis. It also needed a way to have a single stock holding database that could control products split over more than one physical location, or provide for products (single European Article Numbers) that have multi-variations. This could be for new or refurbished products, or products with different levels of completeness. Trojan can support all these aspects with its MIS solution, where no other product can.
Also imperative to Trojan is the ease of integration with clients” platforms and data-sources.
Murphy added: “No business can operate as an island, so on an hourly, daily and weekly basis, we need to access the data that our customers hold, or augment their data with data we”ve produced through the provision of our services. With this in mind, our platform has been developed to provide for flexible but secure data exchange, with the actual data transfers typically being catered by sftp (secure file transfer protocol), utilising our own in-house servers.
“We believe what we have now created with our new physical infrastructure and soft tools is a truly industry leading solution, fit for the demands of 21st century commerce. In fact, we”re continually amazed that some of our peers don”t even see the need for our tools, let alone actually have the equivalent available to them.”
