Overview
In 1966, our very first weld established the foundation of a company founded on commitment to manufacture the finest all-welded aluminum boat. Three generations later, our family commitment remains the same and has not and will not deviate from that premise.
Xpress Boats continues to flourish and revolutionize by investing in technology and improving our methodology to guarantee the finest, cost-efficient solution on the water today.
The Xpress H20Bay is the #1 selling 20-foot aluminum bay boat in America according to statistical data. Consumers over the past 12 months have purchased hundreds more H20Bay boats than the next leading competitor’s model of the same size, which speaks to the quality construction and high level of performance that you will find in every one of the boats we build.
Supernova Award Category
Tech Optimization and Modernization
The Problem
During the pandemic, Xpress Boats leveraged its competitive advantage of fast delivery times, allowing customers to enjoy their boats sooner and maximize their fishing season. To maintain this advantage, the company is focusing on optimizing their processes to ensure on-time delivery.
Human errors, manual processes, bottlenecks, process deviations, and supplier issues are areas Xpress recognizes are potential risks to on-time delivery; therefore, the company launched a process improvement project with a team of ten members who met weekly to identify areas for streamlining and efficiency gains. The team took up to a month to outline a process, identify an issue, and come up with a solution.
It was time consuming because each time a process question arose; the team relied on a dedicated Xpress Boats data analyst to manually query and analyze data to answer the question and locate the problem. It was also difficult to identify when process errors occurred because we only discovered them at the end of the process, during invoicing and shipping.
We may go months and have a process that's failing that we don't know anything about. Suddenly there is an eruption, and we spend an enormous amount of time and resources looking into what's causing it. Not being able to proactively diagnose process issues and see what's causing them to take corrective action negatively impacts on-time delivery and our overall customer experience.
The Solution
The Process Improvement team first examined the Procure to Pay process due to inventory inaccuracies, which had a negative impact on all areas of the business. We sought to understand the reasons behind this issue since it not only led to high inventory and expedited shipping costs but also prevents boats from being manufactured on schedule.
At the same time, Infor released a new solution Infor Process Mining. They showed us a demo with our data from Infor CloudSuite Industrial (CSI) and we quickly saw areas causing inventory inaccuracies. The insights are highly visual, allowing for a quick understanding of the standard business process and clearly highlighting any deviations from it. It became apparent that our vendor return process was not consistently followed, leading to necessary inventory adjustments being overlooked. To address this issue, we implemented a quality control module to ensure adherence to the proper process.
The results
A big gain with Infor Process Mining is that we don’t have to spend time and resources to bring people together from each business unit to try to pinpoint or guess where the delays and inefficiencies are happening. Infor Process Mining is connecting the dots for us and digs deeper into the data to uncover the “why”. This helps us act quickly to resolve the true causes of inefficiencies and address them before they escalate.
Another business process issue we have identified and corrected with the help of Infor Process Mining is ensuring a job order aligns with a sales order. No two boats are alike at Xpress Boats because each boat is crafted with a focus on customization and attention to detail. This customization allows customers to choose from a variety of features to meet their specific needs. With this flexibility, Xpress Boats accommodates sales order changes which may not get propagated to the job order. When this happens, the desired boat is not delivered and must be returned for us to correct. This results in an unhappy customer and an increased cost of the final product.
With Infor Process Mining we can proactively monitor deviations from the standard process and promptly take corrective action so that job orders on the manufacturing floor align with the sales order. This alignment guarantees that the correct products are ordered from vendors, available for assembly, and that boats are produced according to specifications, on schedule, and delivered on time.
Metrics
Out of the box, Infor Process Mining provides industry specific insights into how Infor CloudSuite processes are executing across Procure to Pay, Order to Cash, Demand to Build, etc. For Xpress Boats, this user-friendly tool integrated with Infor CloudSuite Industrial has been providing the following value in just a few months of deployment:
- 98% faster to identify process issues
- 90% reduction in employee time to identify process issues
- 75% reduction in process issue reporting
- 50% reduction in expedited shipping costs for materials
Infor Process Mining is enhancing all areas of the business, including employee experience. With just three IT professionals managing three companies across multiple locations under the Xpress Boats umbrella, efficiency is critical. By partnering with Infor and transitioning to the cloud with Infor CloudSuite Industrial, the team now has a clear path for innovation, allowing them to focus on using technology for continuous process improvement.
See video format describing results -Infor Process Mining use case
The Technology
Moving to the cloud with CSI offers us the latest innovations packaged with Infor Velocity Suite. These include Infor Process Mining, Infor Value+, and more. Infor Process Mining analyzes transactional event data captured within CSI to identify process improvements. Infor Value+ are pre-built solutions for CSI that utilize a select combination of AI, GenAI, RPA, and other advanced technologies to streamline, automate, and improve processes so we don’t have to build these solutions ourselves.
Disruptive Factor
What is game changing is that we can diagnose process issues with Infor Process Mining and then streamline those processes where appropriate with Infor Value+. For example, in the Procure to Pay process, we face high volumes of purchase order (PO) mismatches, leading to vendor payment delays. The issue stems from POs that include items made with aluminum, a commodity with daily price fluctuations. As a result, users must manually correct the price on the PO and then resubmit it. We didn’t realize this was happening as often as it was, especially when vendors send us an updated price list, which must be manually checked and entered. We are implementing Infor Value+ Vendor Price Update to automate the manual process of updating vendor contracts and shorten payment time to our vendors.
An example in the Order to Cash process, we have one person dedicated to manually processing returns from dealers and customers, which is paper based and error-prone with one-by-one entry of lot and serial-tracked items. We are implementing Infor Value+ Return Materials Authorization (RMA) Automation to streamline and digitize the entire process, reducing processing time from 24 hours to just 15–20 minutes or 95% reduction in turnaround time. RMA creation and receiving is automated, with notifications and approvals for more accurate receivables tracking and timely credit note creation.
Shining Moment
We are now better equipped to proactively ensure employees adhere to standard processes and receive retraining if needed to enhance business performance. We're configuring Infor Process Mining to allow management to oversee all processes under their responsibility and ensure users follow standard process flows. Our aim is to take a proactive approach: addressing problems up-front, monitoring, and auditing to prevent issues from occurring. This is very powerful, and we are excited about that.