Yamaha South Africa offers a huge range of products from motorcycles to audio equipment.

Afrisoft was approached to implement a pilot project in Yamaha’s Audio division in Johannesburg, implementing scanners with TransLution™ Software to two areas: Landed Cost Tracking for receipt of imported goods and Sales Order checking to check items that are picked against customer orders.

The Audio division was selected as the pilot project as it deals with high value, low volume items, making it unnecessary for Yamaha to install a large number of scanners to cope with the required volumes.

While Yamaha had previously used scanning systems they had not found a system that could deal with their specific complexities while remaining easy to use. Both the Landed Cost Tracking and Sales Order checking areas had specific complexities that required a system that could be configured to do more than the standard process.

For this reason, Afrisoft was approached to design a system around their specific needs. TransLution™ was implemented to fit the need to read complex barcodes structures and extract and use only the elements that were required, ignoring the rest.

In the case of Sales Order checking, this common process had to be modified to record which serial number was shipped for each line on the sales order. This was done using TransLution™ to allocate serial numbers to a sales order line and releasing the line from the stock reservation as this was being done. If the order was fully picked, the status was changed by TransLution™ to allow the invoice to be generated.

The Landed Cost Tracking process is a way to deal with costs for imported goods where the costs are not limited to purely item costs but also required shipping costs and duties to be managed. This is a complex process, but with TransLution™ a user can simply scan the LCT document and scan the supplier code and serial numbers that have been delivered. TransLution™ uses this information to determine which stock code to use for the receipt. The user has the opportunity to view what was receipted and validate that he is happy with the quantities shown. SYSPRO is then automatically updated with the purchase order receipt.

In addition to the above functions, TransLution™ is also used to do a Stock Take as well as a Cycle Count process.

After the success of this project, the system was also rolled out to the Music division in Durban – a larger warehouse with faster-moving inventory. This site is also running successfully.

About

TransLution™ software was developed to assist manufacturing, warehousing and distribution companies to better manage their business processes and stock handling. The TransLution™ product is particularly focussed on robust integration to customers’ existing ERP, accounting and stock management software for a wide range of transactions. TransLution™ is distributed in Africa by Afrisoft Africa (Pty) Ltd and in Europe by K3 SYSPRO.

Afrisoft Africa (Pty) Ltd was founded in 1998 to serve the specialised needs of agribusiness, manufacturing, warehousing and distribution companies. Afrisoft provides consulting services for business improvement and distributes, implements and supports TransLution™, AGRIS™ and other business improvement software in Africa.