Adexa Customers Share their Stories

Adexa recently held customer gatherings in Las Vegas and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to provide an opportunity for customers to learn each other’s best practices, manufacturing challenges and solutions they’ve tried, and to provide feedback on Adexa’s technology and product development roadmaps.

The Las Vegas customer summit was held at the opulent Venetian Hotel and Casino, where Gondoliers, whose heritage may be closer to Rome New York than any Italian city, gently pole their paying passengers along indoor canals under simulated dusk skies.  No doubt Britney Spears’ recent marriage to Jason Alexander (childhood friend not Seinfeld graduate) would have lasted longer than 52 hours had she been exposed to such romantic grandeur. 

Another of the world’s most spectacular venues hosted the Kuala Lumpur summit – the Mandarin Oriental, in the heart of the city’s business and entertainment district, and in the shadow of the world’s tallest buildings, the Petronas Towers.

The customer summits drew multiple levels of attendees representing multiple companies from different industries located all over the world, and, by and large, attendees found that they had a lot in common – from the software selection process to the challenges they faced during implementation, and on through to the benefits they realized.  

During the selection process, customers, typically, narrowed-down the field of possible solution providers to three: Adexa, a company with a three-letter name, and one with a two-character name.  The latter two companies were usually eliminated when they were asked to demonstrate their products using the customer’s data to perform specific tasks.  Adexa won the deals by rapidly importing and modeling the data at a much finer level of detail than the others, and expressing a willingness to partner with the customer to meet their unique planning challenges.  Adexa’s pragmatic price-point and lower cost of ownership was another factor.

No doubt, you’re familiar with the phrase, “Garbage in, garbage out.”  For Adexa solutions to determine the most accurate plans, they must start with the most accurate source-data.  Providing it to Adexa’s planning engine proved to be a common challenge for customers.  They tended to find that source-data – from ERP systems on down to Excel spreadsheets – needed serious cleansing, and that business processes to obtain the data were also in need of significant improvements.  Getting one’s house in order to take full advantage of Adexa, in some cases, took several unanticipated months, and, thus, implementation times were longer than expected.

Another common learning experience for customers was that people continue to work as they always have, unless they understand and accept why they should bother making a change.  Without that buy-in, the adoption curve for the software, time-to-benefit and ROI will take longer than it should.   Given the opportunity to do it all over again, most companies would more actively involve their future Adexa users in the implementation cycle, to ensure they understand the performance and financial benefits the software will deliver, and how it’ll make their day-to-day working lives better.

Adexa customers also talked about the benefits of their deployments, and, again, common themes emerged.  Those who had ATP raved about its impact on customer satisfaction levels, and customer service was also improved by faster sales order response times and higher on-time delivery percentages.  Those who had implemented Adexa’s Collaborative Demand Planning (CDP) solution sighted improved forecast accuracy and reduced inventories as key benefits.  And most customers also referenced increases in productivity and asset utilization.

Planning is already underway for the next Adexa customer gatherings.  If you’d like to provide us with suggestions for host cities, please send your recommendations to Marketing@adexa.com.