Need for complete and accurate costing of manufactured goods leads to DACSA’s selection of OptiProERP.

LAGUNA HILLS, CA – Accessibility, affordability, and trust: DACSA selects OptiProERP Software, Inc. manufacturing software to manage the complexity of their growing business.

“In February 2002, we started as a company whose centerpiece was to modernize sugar centrifuges in the sugar mills of Mexico. We started growing and exporting from 2004.”

With this introduction, René Hernández, General Director of DACSA (Design, Automation and Centrifuges), took us through more than 15 years of operations of this Mexico-based company and customer of OptiProERP.

The steady growth meant DACSA needed more organized processes. The complexity of their operation increased, and this surpassed their ability to cope with manual systems. Obliged to face the operational challenges of a growing company, DACSA took the logical road: the path of technology, by adopting SAP Business One, SAP’s world-class business management solution designed for small and midsized companies. “SAP is extensible, it is configurable and has wide respect. We keep growing with this software and it helps us to integrate our products,” said René on why they chose SAP Business One.

Honest and direct, René told us about the reality that many organizations live with when they implement technology in their processes, since there is a perception that, when implementing an ERP system, all the processes will be ready. However, for any ERP project to be successful, alignment with the vendor and solution before implementation is critical.

After a period of adaptation, DACSA learned to assimilate the benefits and decipher the unknowns of its implementation process: “When there is staff turnover or doubts begin to exist, you resort to the system and all the data is saved and there is a history of everything. I think that is when you start to see the difference. It is very much linked to the topic of traceability and that I consider is the great virtue of using software,” said René.

With the implementation of SAP Business One, the company understood the challenges of expansion and the importance of process management. They discovered the benefits and areas of opportunity offered by a platform such as SAP: “The beauty of SAP is that it has to work in real time. You cannot leave things accumulated for later.”

On the implementation of SAP, René said: “They gave us good support of the production module that SAP brings.” With SAP, DACSA learned to operate with a system that brought benefits and addressed many challenges.

The instructive exercise was very good training for what was coming.

When asked the reason for activating a control strategy in his company, René described a scenario that thousands of small and midsized companies experience nowadays. Many SMEs are surprised by the growth of their business and do not have the infrastructure or the strategies defined to face these transformations. René added, “To make a product in 16 weeks, there has to be a series of parallel activities. All this becomes complicated if you try to do it manually.”

After 6 years of using SAP Business One (since 2012), DACSA began to develop more specific and advanced manufacturing needs. Specifically, René said, “We needed an alternative to enhance SAP’s cost tracking capabilities. We manufacture parts and subcontract external services. In SAP you enter the cost of the feedstock and the cost of the process, but there is no way to add the extra hours to the specific cost of a manufacturing process. We realized the need to have a system that helped us fully cost the products we were delivering.”

DACSA’s advanced and specific discrete manufacturing needs led them to OptiProERP. The decision to choose OptiProERP, an end-to-end manufacturing-specific ERP that is built on the SAP Business One core platform, had a lot to do with the context of the organization. OptiProERP, which is developed and designed specifically for discrete manufacturing by manufacturing experts, met the needs of DACSA in areas of speed of implementation, fit with its manufacturing processes, and high-touch customer service and follow-up. DACSA’s business is cyclical; it has very specific workload stages across the year. They had a short window of time to make a change, and required an intuitive ERP system that adapted quickly and naturally to their manufacturing processes. “It is not very helpful to us to implement when there is a high workload, we had this window of time, and we had to be aware that our company has a huge manufacturing process,” said René.

The accessibility and affordability in cost of OptiProERP was also directly related to DACSA’s decision. As a growing company, DACSA must analyze with intelligence and caution each of their investments, optimizing resources is vital and every decision is taken very carefully to ensure the best possible return on investment. René Hernández pointed out the importance of finding a robust ERP that covered the needs of the company, had an affordable cost and a backup of trust: “For us, an investment is based on trust.”