The Viking Yacht Company is a $275-million family-owned business that builds more than 100 sport fishing yachts a year in a high-technology, 550,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in New Gretna, N.J. With an increased emphasis on service, Viking Yacht needed an enterprise resource planning system that would better support its service system.
Infor Manufacturing Essentials
Viking Yacht Company Addresses Marine Manufacturer's
Business Issues
The CompanyThe Viking Yacht Company is a $275-million family-owned business that builds more than 100sport fishing yachts a year in a high-technology, 550,000-square-foot manufacturing facility inNew Gretna, N.J. Except for engines and appliances, virtually every part of the yachts, whichrange from 45 to 74 feet, is designed and manufactured on site by Viking Yacht. The companyis highly focused on quality control and detail. Each yacht is thoroughly inspected by factory-trained personnel during construction to help ensure reliability, safety and longevity.Viking Yacht formed a strategic alliance with Princess Yachts International of Plymouth,England in 1995, creating Viking Sport Cruisers. Viking Sport Cruisers distributes English builtcruising yachts ranging in size from 50 to 95 feet. Subsequently, Viking Sport Cruisers alsoformed a joint venture with an Italian builder, Sanlorenzo, and began offering Mega-Yachts,ÅìëíçãÉê=ëìÅÅÉëë=ëíçêówhich exceeded 100 feet in length.ÇáëÅêÉíÉ=ã~åìÑ~ÅíìêáåÖIn 2001, Viking Yacht purchased a marina in Riviera Beach, Fla., and invested $10 million inupgrades to make it a state-of-the-art service facility and a full-service boatyard solely for the"All the information is use of Viking owners.
processed the same The SituationWith an increased emphasis on service, Viking Yacht needed an enterprise resource planningway and is available system that would better support its service system. Throughout the organization were scattered"islands" of information, and data was processed in different manners in various parts of thefor everyone based on company. Viking Yacht lacked the automated tools required to detect repair trends and feed thatinformation back to the design and production processes. Moreover, it needed other access levels and technology-based processes to improve the efficiency of its service operations and technicians.Additionally, Viking Yacht had very limited quantifiable data available to help reduce warrantyfinancial reporting is repair problems and costs.
consistently the same The SolutionViking Yacht partnered with Infor in 2001 to implement Infor ERP SyteLine 5.0 technology,from one site to the part of Infor's Manufacturing Essentials suite of solutions for discrete manufacturers, andintegrated it with FS-Plus, a service-management application from Infor solution partner Singlenext." Source Systems. SyteLine automated many processes, ranging from product configuration andinventory control to production procurement and financial management, while it provided dataJohn Kasinski to FS-Plus to organize service history, service scheduling and service execution in New JerseyVice President of Finance and Florida.
The new integrated solution creates a service repair order (SRO) with detailed, bar-codedoperations, for every yacht entering the facility. Technicians used bar-coded employee badgesand bar-code wands to record the labor involved in each operation automatically. The systemalso tracked the skills and schedules of each technician and scheduled them for service jobswhile simultaneously maintaining an exact "as-serviced" record for each yacht.
The company is in the process of upgrading to Infor ERP SyteLine 7 to take advantage of thelatest technologies and functionality.
Å~ëÉ=ëíìÇó"Infor's SyteLine has Real ResultsBy employing Infor technology, Viking Yacht has eliminated disparate collections of dataand nonstandard processes. Everyone throughout Viking's 15 business units now usesworked tremendously SyteLine in all functional areas. here and we are very "All the information is processed the same way and is available for everyone based onaccess levels," says John Kasinski, vice president of finance for Viking Yacht, "andhappy with our financial reporting is consistently the same from one site to the next."decision." Costing is more accurate now that managers can review real-time costs for any boat in theJohn Kasinski manufacturing process or in the field, improving decision-making. Kasinski recounts, forexample, "Once we were able to accurately capture costs through SyteLine, we wereVice President of Finance disappointed in the low margins on our 43-foot product line. We discontinued thatproduct line and replaced it with a newly-designed 45-footer that became more profitableand is still in production today."
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