Hwa Leong Marine Engineering

A Success Story for Hwa Leong Marine Engineering Pte Ltd

Hwa Leong Marine Engineering Pte Ltd (HL) contracted PBA Solutions to design a project management system on a collaborative team platform to allow them to execute their jobs more effectively and efficiently. The company now proactively controls manufacturing and operations, the levels of inventory available for use and the cost of production to allow them to increase sales and service and to reduce hidden costs.

As a Small Medium Enterprise (SME) in a niche market, HL's core line of business is to produce fabrications of steel for marine equipment and supplies in the marine shipping industry. HL needs to stay competitive and offer better customer services as well as watch their cost and profitability. With about twenty ships whom they regularly service at the moment, HL needs to cope with existing projects and jobs these clients demand in order to maintain client satisfaction. HL's medium objectives include the automation and empowerment of their workforce and work flow processes so that they can eventually expand to take on more projects and service more clients.

The Challenge

With the current number of ongoing projects and the need to scale to accept more projects, the facilities of the existing installation were inadequate, particularly on the production end. There was very little visibility for the head engineers on the overall progress of a project and how much additional costs that project had incurred with regards to man hours and inventory. Management information was poor and profitability views were rare. 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 HL. 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.

HL fabricates steel for customers on a project basis. The Pandora Business Suite — Trading, Distribution and Manufacturing is used to manage these projects by scheduling project tasks, tracking man hours through time sheets and inventory usage, consolidate cutting plans per project task, invoicing and calculation of costs during the running of a project. Additionally the workforce is on-line to a central system that they can monitor schedules and delivery time lines.

The Benefits

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

• They can manage multiple projects and search for details of each project in one view for work updates and delay alerts

• They have a true measure of the cost of production

• They are able to track man hours to manage the workforce

• They are able to manage Accounts and tie projects with respective clients

• 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 summary, their growth and expansion will now be driven by and based on solid data.

Solution: Pandora Business Suite — Trading, Distribution and Manufacturing; Database: MySQL; Platform:OpenSource ; No. of users: 8