Experience

United States Automaker

Carsley and Associates is a Tier One supplier of technology services to a United States Automaker. We designed and developed a logistics system that reduced our customer's repeating communication operating costs by over 50,000 hard dollars a month. In soft dollar savings the company has and will realize much more over time with reduced support costs of legacy systems.

We architected and designed our systems with flexibility to provide for additional capabilities that our customer only dreamed of.

This project had many challenges to integrate with the backend systems, but we have worked with many organizations that have these challenges and successfully created and implemented the solution. We utilized many technologies to make this system successful and delivered what the customer needed while keeping the costs on budget and keeping the project on schedule. Technology utilized was: Java, Microsoft ASP.NET, Microsoft C#, MS SQL Server, XML, Blackberry API, Blackberry development environment, BES server, and Research In Motion (RIM) development tools, among other Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools to ensure we delivered exactly what the customer NEEDED!

One of the top 10 largest Steel Service Centers in the United States

Carsley and Associates has a consulting team that focuses in the metals industry. Our customer wanted to improve their sales force team efforts by making their team more efficient. Carsley met with the sales force team and designed a sales management system (SMS) that utilized existing tools and integrated with our customer's backend order to fulfillment (ERP) system. The new system had to be easy to use for their sales force and as well as fit into their existing technology strategy. Goals for this new system included:

• The ability for the sales team to manage customer information easier.
• Extract customer order and shipment data easily.
• Integrate with their phone and PDA devices.
• Create, maintain call and visit report information and disseminate information quickly and easily to support staff where issues needed to be resolved.
• Provide the tools to automate the OSR duties (business planning and forecasting) and free up their time enough to make 5% more calls on customers and potential customers.
• Grow the business with the existing staff.
• Maintain top customer service ratings by having customer information readily available. If there were issues at a customer location, the system would notify the appropriate department and individuals for follow-up.
• Management would have the ability to trend the amount of prospects being visited by their sales force, and identify where areas of training were needed.
• Management would have reporting capability and immediate knowledge (business intelligence) of customer status, and any issues as well as a history of that customer’s relationship with the company over several years and be able to search, filter, and find important customer information quickly.
• Automated Email notification workflow system built-in which provided the right people with the information they needed quickly.
• Maintain customer profiles, contacts, itineraries, for the outside sales force.

Our Sales Management System provided the functionality that fulfilled the above goals with 100% satisfaction from our customer.

One of the largest Integrated Steel Mills in the United States

Carsley has been providing solutions to business problems for over 12 years in the metals industry and has the business acumen to understand the complex business processes and business rules that a company requires to improve their business model and competitiveness in the marketplace.

Our Steel mill customer had a need to manage their inventory and "smooth" out their melt order requests so they have the right steel at the right time. Due to capacity constraints on production, the inventory management (supply chain management) system had to take into account many business rules to successfully automate from Customer Demand Forecast information all the way through to the system calculating proposed order to the mill based on several variables, including capacity and scheduling constraints.

The goals were to keep optimized inventory banks on parts so as not to shut down customer plants and not to continually have to expedite material and "fighting daily fires" with customers running out of inventory.

As the market softens, the inventory management system maintained optimum banks of inventory to keep inventory levels from getting out of hand as well as keeping inventory on the right parts.

As the market tightened, the inventory management system smoothed out the inventory banks and freed up capacity for higher end purchase orders to maximize margin potential and still satisfy existing customer orders.

Our systems consisted of:

• Business planning and forecasting system
• Supply Chain Management System (Supply & Demand)

These two systems integrate with the I2 Factory/Master Planner for capacity benchmarking so our customer could take unconstrained forecasted demand, constrain it based on capacity and then crunch it through the supply chain management system to determine when additional melt orders had to be placed throughout the month.

Having the right inventory on the right parts was a tremendous cost savings in the millions for our customer.