Overview

Manufacturing is of critical importance to the Malaysia economy – the 2nd largest industry, employing around 28% of the total Malaysia workforce*. However, it faces fierce economic challenges such as the strong pound and intense competition from countries able to produce at lower cost. As customers expect lower prices, manufacturers are constantly driving to lower operating costs. In response to these challenges, Malaysia manufacturing companies are searching to differentiate themselves by developing higher added-value products and services.
*Source: Economic Report 2000/2001

Key drivers

Manufacturing companies have been forced to reassess their businesses and focus on core competencies. Organizations concentrate on those activities that add the most value and outsource non-core activities to specialist firms. Outsourcing services range from security, canteen management, distribution and transport, to information technology and telecommunications requirements. Print and reprographics are key areas for facilities managed services.

Optimum operational effectiveness is also being driven by build-to-order and just-in- time manufacturing to keep inventory and stock levels to an absolute minimum to save on storage costs. These trends mean that manufacturing companies forge close partnership with key suppliers who are strategically located next to their customers’ factory for just-in-time delivery of key parts.

Document Needs

To become more effective in terms of both cost and operations, document processes must match manufacturing needs and timing. For example, when stock is being produced to a just-in-time scale, user manuals and product literature need a correspondingly tight production time-scale. There is a move away from the expensive storing of pre-printed documentation.

The just-in-time document production process becomes particularly complex and demanding when literature and user manuals are printed in multiple languages for hundreds of different products. In today’s competitive business environment, manufacturing deadlines cannot be held-up, even for minutes, whilst the right documentation is sent to the production line.

Distribution is also changing the requirements of product literature. Previously products (and the corresponding information) were often manufactured in one country and distributed to other countries for sale.

Today, manufacturing tends to be set-up as close to the final point of distribution as possible. But documentation has still had to be shipped out from the producing country.

With the advent of the latest networked, digital print technologies, documents can be sent electronically to the right country, anywhere in the world. This radically reduces the costs of having to courier heavy paper documentation. Digital printing also significantly cuts the production time and allows edits to be made late in the production schedule - helping to ensure information is as up-to-date as possible.

Our Solutions

Enterprise Resource Planning Document Management Services

ERDM Solutions provide solutions for enterprise wide document needs, such as networked office solutions and add-on document management capabilities to an ERP system. They leverage ERP investments by providing increased functionality in support of order process management and customer relationship management.

Xerox ERP Document Management Services provide ERP customers with three significant benefits:

	Faster Access to All Reports Customer information resides in legacy and ERP systems and externally in customer e-mail messages and postal documents. Our document repository solutions provide real time Intranet access to ERP, legacy and external documents.
	Better Customer Service By giving Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) access to all customer and company information via electronic document repository services, they can handle customer queries immediately instead of having to "get back" to customers hours or days later. This increases productivity and customer satisfaction.
	Cost Reduction In addition to allowing CSRs to handle customer queries faster, immediate intranet access to all relevant customer and company information also enables CSRs to respond to significantly more queries in a shorter time. Additionally, since, Xerox’ intranet document repository systems are external to ERP and legacy systems, they provide access through your intranet browser without the cost of additional ERP or legacy system seat costs.