How boat manufacturer leverages Infor Process Mining to ensure on-time delivery

Xpress Boats is an American company located in Hot Springs, Arkansas, specializing in the manufacture of all-aluminum, all-welded fishing boats, pontoon boats, and aluminum trailers. It stands out in the industry due to its unique construction method, which provides greater durability and longevity, encouraging repeat customers for the "Xpress experience." The company’s boats are a common sight on lakes across the United States, reflecting its widespread popularity and brand recognition.

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 as 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 a month to outline a process, identify an issue, and develop a solution. The process was time-consuming because each time a question arose, the team relied on a dedicated Xpress Boats data analyst to manually query and analyze data to find the answer and locate the problem.

On-demand business process monitoring and analysis with Infor Process Mining

“Infor Process Mining now gives us insights into our business processes so that we can act quickly to correct issues that negatively impact our customers, suppliers, and even our employees. Prior to Infor Process Mining, 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 time and resources looking into what's causing it. With Infor Process Mining, we can quickly go in and see what's causing it. It's been amazing,” says Jennifer Terry, Information Systems Manager.

The latest addition to the Infor Process Intelligence suite, Infor™ Process Mining provides automated, industry-specific insights into how Infor CloudSuite processes are executing. 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

Reducing expedited shipping costs by 50% by improving inventory accuracy

The Process Improvement team first examined the Procure to Pay process to address inventory inaccuracies, which disrupted multiple aspects of the business.

Xpress Boats sought to understand the reasons behind this issue, as these inaccuracies not only led to high inventory and expedited shipping costs but also affected on-time delivery. When inventory inaccuracies prevented a boat from being manufactured on schedule, it resulted in delays in shipping the product on time.

“ The insights provided by Infor Process Mining 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 the quality control module to ensure adherence to the proper process,” says Jason Tugwell, ERP Systems Analyst.

After resolving the inventory accuracy issue by activating the Infor Quality Control (QC) module, Xpress Boats has successfully reduced expedited shipping and inventory costs, while also improving on-time delivery. Furthermore, the QC module captures vendor performance, enabling users to make better vendor selections based on data-driven insights.

Improving customer experience with proactive monitoring of business processes

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, finishes, and accessories to meet their specific preferences. Despite the flexibility to accommodate order changes, these changes were not always propagated to the job order, resulting in incorrect products being invoiced or shipped.

With out of the box capabilities, Infor Process Mining identifies process deviations, allowing for swift corrective action to ensure that job orders on the manufacturing floor align with customer orders. 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.

“It was difficult to identify when process errors occurred because we only discovered them at the end of the process, during invoicing and shipping. If a part was missing from the boat due to a change in the sales order, we might not have it in stock, leading to expedited part orders and increased costs for the final product. From a customer service perspective, this results in longer wait times for product delivery. However, with Infor Process Mining, we can proactively monitor deviations from the standard process and promptly take corrective action, ensuring products are delivered as promised,” says Alan Gresham, Data Analyst.

Xpress Boats is now better equipped to proactively ensure that 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 upfront, monitoring, and auditing to prevent issues from occurring. This is a very powerful tool for us," says Gresham.

Driving more automated solutions with business process insights

With on-demand insights across Procure to Pay, Order to Cash, and Demand to Build, business process owners can precisely identify hidden patterns and inefficiencies, allowing them to take swift action to automate using Infor solutions that are available with Infor Velocity Suite.

In Order to Cash, Xpress Boats had approximately 30 steps involved for invoicing. By streamlining these steps and accelerating the invoicing process, Xpress Boats can receive payments more quickly and improve the customer experience through timely delivery of invoices.

“In our invoicing process, I noticed manually copying and pasting a job order repeatedly in five consecutive steps. We're collaborating with Infor to automate these five steps, which will reduce the number of steps, eliminate human error, and shorten the invoicing time." says Gresham.

In the Procure to Pay process, Xpress Boats faced high volumes of purchase order (PO) mismatches, leading to vendor payment delays. The issue stemmed from POs that included items made with aluminum, a commodity with daily price fluctuations. As a result, users must manually adjust the pricing and resend the PO.

“Another thing we observed with Infor Process Mining insights that we didn’t expect were the deviations in the receiving area,” says Tugwell. “When they were getting ready to pay an invoice, they would realize that the prices weren't matching the PO. They would have to correct the price on the PO and then re-receive. We didn’t realize this was happening as often as it was. We're now collaborating with Infor to automate these manual steps to shorten payment time to our vendors,” says Tugwell.

In summary, Infor Process Mining is enhancing all areas of the business, including the 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 solving business challenges rather than spending time identifying and troubleshooting issues.

Click here to learn how you can eliminate five key business process bottlenecks with Infor Process Mining.