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The Company
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. Except for engines and appliances, virtually every part of the yachts, which range from 45 to 74 feet, is designed and manufactured on site by Viking Yacht. The company is 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 built cruising yachts ranging in size from 50 to 95 feet. Subsequently, Viking Sport Cruisers also formed a joint venture with an Italian builder, Sanlorenzo, and began offering Mega-Yachts, which exceeded 100 feet in length.
In 2001, Viking Yacht purchased a marina in Riviera Beach, Fla., and invested $10 million in upgrades to make it a state-of-the-art service facility and a full-service boatyard solely for the use of Viking owners.
With an increased emphasis on service, Viking Yacht needed an enterprise resource planning way 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 the for everyone based on trends and feed that information 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.
The new integrated solution creates a service repair order (SRO) with detailed, bar-coded operations, for every yacht entering the facility. Technicians used bar-coded employee badges and bar-code wands to record the labor involved in each operation automatically. The system also tracked the skills and schedules of each technician and scheduled them for service jobs while 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 the latest technologies and functionality.
"Infor?s SyteLine has Real Results
Surveys of customers show that their satisfaction has soared, while warranty costs have dropped 35 percent. Viking now can capture every repair and incident by type to determine recurring issues by cost and frequency, enabling it quickly to find root causes and handle repairs.
With these cost reductions and time savings, Viking no longer has difficulty squeezing in warranty work, allowing it to increase billable repairs, which previously accounted for just five percent of the work at its Florida facility. Today, customer-paid work is up to 55 percent and warranty repairs have tumbled to just 45 percent.
The Viking Yacht Company has gained real results from its reliance on Infor solutions:
- Standardized processes and consistent financial reporting across the enterprise that save time and improve accuracy.
- Work order standardization decreased the time supervisors spent chasing paper and following up on questions by about 40 percent.
- Real-time capture of costs that guide the elimination of low profit margin lines and the development of more profitable products.
- Reduction in warranty costs of 35 percent.
- Increase in the proportion of billable repair work to 55 percent from the previous five percent from the sharp reduction in warranty work.
- A return on investment of less than one year because of reduced warranty, production and administrative costs, coupled with higher customer satisfaction and improved decision making.
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