Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Malibu Boats Extends “High Performance” to Information Access
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Manufacturing
Customer Profile
Malibu Boats is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of high-performance, custom tournament ski boats with facilities in Merced, California; Loudon, Tennessee; and Albury, Australia.
Business Situation
Malibu Boats used Microsoft® Business Solutions–Great Plains® to manage its business and financial information, but needed an efficient way to extend access to job-critical data for more employees.
Solution
Malibu Boats implemented Microsoft Business Portal 2.0, seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Great Plains, to open and extend the flow of business information across the organization.
Benefits
Enhanced customer service
Extended critical information
Integrated with business data
Easy set up and maintenance / "When you have a dealer or a customer on the phone inquiring about an order they placed, 2 clicks versus 15 clicks is not only more efficient for us, it's also simply better customer service."
Rick Rank, Head Nerd, Malibu Boats
Malibu Boats, one of the world’s leading high-performance ski boat manufacturers, was swimming in information. Already using Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains (now part of Microsoft Dynamics™) to help manage its business information and processes, Malibu Boats wanted a Web-based portal that would give employees a single-entry point to the company’s rich back-office information. Malibu Boats found a solution with Microsoft Business Solutions Business Portal 2.0 (now part of Microsoft Dynamics™). Using a familiar Web browser interface, easy-to-define queries, and key performance indicators (KPIs), Malibu Boats has opened the flow of business information to more employees, helping them to manage business processes and deliver on promises. The result: with minimal disruption to employees or operations, the company is seeing decreased information support costs, IT staff freed from time-consuming tasks, and improved customer service.
Situation
From its humble beginnings in a rented building in 1982, Malibu Boats has raced to the top of the industry as a manufacturer of finely crafted, high-performance custom watersport boats with a reputation for cutting-edge innovation. Known for superior engineering design, quality craftsmanship, and outstanding performance, Malibu boats are produced by a dedicated team of 410 employees at company-owned plants in Merced, California, and Loudon, Tennessee, and at a third plant in Albury, Australia.
Now entering its third decade, Malibu Boats attributes its success to founder Robert Alkema’s company philosophy of supplying watersport boats of the absolute best value, performance, and quality. Its employees pursue boat building with the same passion and commitment that fueled the company’s five original employees, and they constantly look for ways to refine its boat designs to meet the evolving needs of avid skiers, wakeboarders, and boating families. In addition to skyrocketing sales, Malibu Boats won an unprecedented nine Ski Boat of the Year awards in the past 10 years, set 11 world records, and won the Impact Design of the Year award for the Wedge, a wake enhancement system.
To help manage its business information and processes, the company relies on Microsoft® Business Solutions–Great Plains® and other integrated business applications to handle manufacturing, distribution, human resources, and financial management processes. With a comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, lack of information isn’t a problem. However, with increasing customer orders and soaring sales revenue, putting that information into the hands of the employees that need it was becoming even more critical to Malibu’s success.
Malibu Boats’ employees use Microsoft Great Plains to place customer orders and access information about inventory items, invoice amount or back orders. When information is required by an employee without direct access to Microsoft Great Plains, the request is usually made via e-mail or phone call, making it difficult to share information efficiently and respond quickly to customer inquiries. Rick Rank, “Head Nerd” and IT team leader at Malibu Boats, explains, “Our biggest challenge is providing access to information in a quick and readable format. If there’s a better way to access information, we need it.”
Solution
Malibu Boats had the information they needed with Microsoft Great Plains. The problem was delivering convenient access to a broader group of employees. The company decided to implement a Web-based solution that would integrate seamlessly with Microsoft Great Plains, providing a single point of entry to information through Microsoft Internet Explorer.
With a self-sufficient IT department, Malibu Boats does most of its own development work and considered building its own solution by using Microsoft Windows® SharePoint™ Services and building Web parts with Microsoft Visual Basic® development system. However, after researching Microsoft Business Solution’s portal offerings, Malibu Boats managers quickly realized they would save time, money, and valuable IT resources by implementing Microsoft Business Portal 2.0 rather than spending an estimated six months to develop a solution from scratch. "Business Portal eliminates a lot of the time that we were planning on spending designing a portal ourselves," says Rank.
Malibu’s IT team worked with the Microsoft Business Solutions Business Portal Rapid Adoption Program to plan and implement the solution. In only three business days, the portal was up and running, and provided access to queries modeled after customer service employees’ SmartList favorites from Microsoft Great Plains. In addition to the queries, Malibu Boats plans to provide access through the portal to a SharePoint document library containing manufacturing specs and product catalogs for each boat it builds. The IT team also is in the process of defining multiple KPIs based on data from Microsoft Great Plains to provide key department heads views of the company’s business performance.
The portal solution has been set up partly on the technology infrastructure that was already in place for Microsoft Great Plains. Built on Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Business Portal seamlessly integrates with the ERP solution. Using Internet Explorer, the portal provides access to the information in the Microsoft SQL Server™ database, installed on a Dell PowerEdge 2650 server with dual Xeon 2.8 Ghz processors, 4 GB of RAM, and 79 GB of hard disk space configured with RAID 5 and three redundant drives. Microsoft Business Portal was installed on a second Dell server with the same configuration.
With Microsoft Business Portal in place so quickly, the flow of existing business information opened just as quickly to a broader group of employees across the Malibu Boats organization, helping to provide superior customer service more efficiently. "The information was already there, but Business Portal allows us to get to key data faster and easier," explains Rank.
Benefits
With Microsoft Business Portal, Malibu Boats delivers the information employees need to make smart business decisions and provide better customer service. Almost immediately, Malibu Boats started to see the benefits of implementing the Web-based portal solution, and expects Microsoft Business Portal to be a huge win for its organization and its customers.
Boost Customer Service Capabilities
Microsoft Business Portal provides employees with a single point of entry to the information they need to provide the superior level of service customers have come to expect from Malibu Boats. Now, by using a query, many common information requests can be answered almost instantly. Customer service representatives simply open an Internet Explorer page and, right away, create the query that will provide customers with answers to their questions, such as the status of an order. "We’re reducing a 15-click process to a 2-click process. That reduction alone increases the efficiency of our Customer Service Department," explains Rank.
Customers expect quick responses to their questions and concerns. Microsoft Business Portal not only maximizes Malibu Boats’ efficiency, but also helps the company deliver what its customers expect. "When you have a dealer or a customer on the phone, inquiring about an order they placed, 2 clicks versus 15 clicks is not only more efficient for us, it's also simply better customer service," says Rank.
Microsoft Business Portal also gives sales representatives quick access to Microsoft Great Plains functionality. Malibu uses the shortcuts provided with Microsoft Business Portal to enable users to launch the specific window in Microsoft Great Plains they need, for example, to enter an order or create a new customer record. These shortcuts eliminate the need to use the menu system to find the proper transaction screen.
Extend Critical Business Information
Microsoft Business Portal helps extend critical information to employees across the organization, while maintaining tight control over confidential business data. With role-based user accounts that define the level of information each user needs, Microsoft Business Portal provides employees with convenient entry to the relevant data without having to go through Microsoft Great Plains. Now, even employees who do not use Great Plains directly can access critical information in the back office—information essential for their jobs. For instance, employees in the Engineering Department need back-office information to make simple inquiries about such things as inventory or purchase order status. Buyers need to know what items are currently under-stocked and need to be reordered. Now they can retrieve that information easily with Microsoft Business Portal.
In the next few months, Malibu Boats employees also will be able to access a document library containing technical articles and boat specification information important to customer service and other departments across the company, thus helping them to stay abreast of the sports craft industry and documenting the company’s own products. Plans are also in the works to use Windows SharePoint Services features to organize and manage the company’s “boat books” online. Currently, the company stores paper files that document every step—from manufacturing to shipping to customer service contacts—for each of thousands of boats produced by Malibu Boats during the past 20 years.
Understand Business Performance
Malibu Boats is currently in the process of creating KPIs as part of their Microsoft Business Portal solution. KPIs help the organization define and track metrics that are critical to its success and deliver personalized views of this key business information to executives. For each of the teams—Purchasing, Customer Service, and IT—KPIs will help provide insight into current performance. The President and the Chief Financial Officer will have dashboard views of key financial information right at their fingertips and complete with red/yellow/green alerts to notify them of conditions that demand further attention. Rank, impressed with KPIs, says, "The ability of KPIs to summarize critical information in a usable fashion is a major benefit for Malibu Boats."
KPIs will be especially important in the rollup of information from the company’s two U.S.-based plants. Specific KPIs describe current orders, order types, orders by plant location, and delays or backorder status. For example, upholstery orders might take 2-3 weeks to complete, but a parts order should be filled within 24 hours. With KPIs, Malibu Boats managers can see a breakdown of each type of order so they can evaluate how well they are handling those different kinds of orders.
Deploy Rapidly
In three days, Malibu Boats had Microsoft Business Portal up and running, including the queries and other functions its employees needed to use. Compared with the six months the IT team estimated it would take to plan and implement their own solution, it is easy to see how Microsoft Business Portal has made an immediate impact on Malibu’s IT availability. Out-of-the box integration with Microsoft Great Plains and Microsoft Office System programs and applications greatly simplified the implementation process, making it possible for the IT team to focus on defining and creating the most relevant queries and KPIs for employees.
Because Malibu Boats employees are already comfortable using a Web browser, delivering information through Business Portal means users can work in a familiar environment. Employees were up and running quickly with minimal need for training, and the company anticipates that having a “comfort zone” will reduce training efforts and the learning curve for future users. "Essentially," explains Rank, "everything is point and click using Internet Explorer—which everyone is already familiar with."
With Microsoft Business Portal, Malibu Boats is extending its competitive edge in the marketplace, continuing to use the same passion, focus, and attention to excellence that has sustained them at the top of its industry throughout the years.
Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that enables you and your people to make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like familiar Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office, which means less of a learning curve for your people, so they can get up and running quickly and focus on what’s most important. And because it is from Microsoft, it easily works with the systemsthat your company already has implemented. By automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship, and supply chain processes, Microsoft Dynamics brings together people, processes, and technologies, increasing the productivity and effectiveness of your business, and helping you drive business success.
For more information about Microsoft Dynamics, go to: