Cragar Industries

A Success Story for Cragar Industries Pte Ltd

Cragar Industries Pte Ltd (Cragar) contracted PBA Solutions to design a production management system on a collaborative team platform to allow them to produce goods more effectively and efficiently. The company now proactively controls their manufacturing production and operations, the levels of inventory available for use and costs.
Established since August 1990, Cragar Industries Pte Ltd specializes in the fabrication of precision mechanical components and sub-assembly of optical and medical instruments for renowned product manufacturers. Cragar needed to stay competitive and offer better customer services as well as watch their cost and profitability in production. Cragar needs to cope with existing projects and jobs in order to maintain client satisfaction. Cragar's medium objectives include the automation and empowerment of their workforce and work flow processes to become more productive and eventually expand.

The Challenge

With their current business and operational processes, Cragar found it difficult to manage their productions and work team inefficiencies due to the lack of communication. There is also the lack of ability to scale as current operational process hinders productivity and efficiency. Particularly for their production work team, there was no monitoring of wastages and inventory used. Additionally, time spent on the production of a particular part was not recorded and labor costs and man hours were not tracked. Management information was poor and profitability views were rare as data was not centrally collected. Work teams collected separate manual spreadsheets with hardcopies of data resulting in double entries across departments. A strategic management decision was made to upgrade to a system that can serve their current and medium term needs and did not require significant IT literacy.

The Solution

From Industry references, they contacted PBA Solutions who are known to provide business process solutions in the engineering space. The resulting scope and additional customizations were detailed by PBA Solutions who demonstrated specific solutions to their business process issues by providing IT consultants and engineers to assist Cragar. Implementation was rapid with minimal diversion from the agreed scope and project plan. This also included a full training plan for all the staff involved and would be using the system.
Cragar fabricates raw materials to manufacture and produce parts for their customers on a lot number basis. Pandora Business Suite — Trading, Distribution and Manufacturing is used to manage operational processes including the Production Process, Human Resource, Accounts, Quality Assurance (QA) and Warehousing Inventory. For Human Resource, personnel utilize a card tap access system and this data is fed backend to a central data base for payroll and attendance.  The production process marks goods by lot numbers, contract numbers and invoice numbers, which links Accounts, sales teams and the QA team for accounting, component checks and customer follow ups. Additionally, monitoring the in and out of inventory is managed in the central system and the management gets birds’ eye views of all operations to calculate costs, profitability and manage productivity.

The Benefits

Already, Cragar is benefiting from the wide range of functionality within the Pandora Business Suite — Trading, Distribution and Manufacturing.

• They can manage productions
• They have a true measure of the cost of production with the tracking of wastages and inventory
• They are able to track man hours and payroll to manage the workforce
• They are able to get invoices out quicker and reduce manual double entries and increase accuracy
• They can easily access this web based application so long as they have internet connectivity
• They received training for their staff and technical support for implementation

In addition, their growth and expansion will now be driven by and based on solid data.
Solution: Pandora Business Suite — Trading, Distribution and Manufacturing; Platform: open source; Database- mySQL; No. of users: 10; 20-30 production folks affected