CUSTOMER:
Nienkämper Furniture & Accessories Inc.
Toronto, ON Canada
www.nienkamper.com
INDUSTRY:
High-end office furniture
Locations: 1
Employees: 185
Annual sales: $50 million
Users on Sage Accpac: 35
Solution Components:
Sage Accpac ERP with HR and
Payroll modules, MISys
Manufacturing System,
Manusonic Sonic Enterprise
“Impac is the most accommodating VAR I’ve ever worked with. They’ve never let us down.”
— Lisa Sanguinetti, CHRP HR Manager Nienkämper Furniture & Accessories
(416) 385-3114
675 Cochrane Dr.
East Tower, 6th Floor
Markham, Ontario L3R 0B8
www.impacsolutions.com
Success Story
Impac Solutions Furnishes Nienkämper with Significant Time- and Money-Savings
“We need fast, accurate job costing to calculate profit margins – and run our business smarter.”
Nienkämper, a family-owned Canadian manufacturer of high-end corporate office and public space furniture, faced an enviable dilemma. Its award-winning designs and cutting-edge innovations had resulted in tremendous growth. But antiquated accounting software did not let management perform detailed analysis to streamline operations and improve profitability. Also, outsourced payroll services tied up important assets and made it difficult to provide exceptional employee service.
“We interviewed three different consultants about a new system,” says Lisa
Sanguinetti, CHRP, Human Resources Manager at Nienkämper. “Impac Solutions impressed us with their in-depth knowledge of Sage Accpac, a well-respected name in the industry. We also liked Impac’s value proposition, and their amicability. We felt confident entrusting our company’s future to them.”
End-to-End Management
Impac Solutions developed and implemented a seamless business solution to automate almost every aspect of Nienkämper’s operations. Today, Nienkämper uses Sage Accpac ERP to run its finances, with integrated modules to manage human resources and payroll. It uses MISys Manufacturing System to track
| CHALLENGE: Legacy business system was not customizable, could not support job costing; outsourced payroll limited flexibility |
SOLUTION: End-to-end accounting, manufacturing, HR and payroll solution based on Sage Accpac ERP |
RESULTS: 185 employees supported by two-person HR group; improved job costing abilities |
production. Employees log into Sonic Enterprise from Manusonic, a time and attendance and labour allocation device, which delivers data to Sage Accpac for automatic processing and job costing. Soon, Sage CRM will be used as an AR collection tool, and as a helpdesk for in-house support of the company’s IT infrastructure.
“The new system is a vast improvement over our old accounting processes,” says Sanguinetti. “We use Sage Accpac to create orders, pay purchase orders, cut cheques, shop and invoice while managing manufacturing orders. And we are putting much more information into the system than ever before, such as returned goods and labour collection and allocation costs. Because all aspects of the system are integrated, we only need to enter information once.”
Manufacturing Management and Job Costing
Nienkämper now relies on MISys Manufacturing to gather operational data for financial processing. The system includes bill of materials, purchasing, scheduling, and shop floor control with bin tracking.
“We can now drill down to view any level of detail in manufacturing,” says Sanguinetti. “Our industry is extremely competitive, and about 40 percent of our jobs are custom orders. If we’re bidding on a very large order, it’s essential that we calculate our bid very carefully. Sage Accpac and MISys let us do this with a click of the mouse, for much greater cost control and overall efficiencies.”.
Payroll and HR
Previously, Nienkämper used two unrelated time tracking systems, one for total employee hours, and another for specific jobs, leaving unassignable hours. This has been alleviated with a ManuSonic system, which interfaces with Sage Accpac, ensuring that all hours are accounted for, and that each job reflects appropriate labor.
Sage Accpac has also replaced the outsourced payroll service. “Our vendor restricted the way we could pay employees,” explains Sanguinetti. “If we needed to generate a check manually, it had to be done with GL entries, which was very inconvenient. Also, they held onto taxes for many days after payday. Adding the savings in interest, service fees and rental on time clocks, we’re seeing real cost savings by doing payroll in-house.”
She also appreciates the automatic links between Sage Accpac’s general ledger and payroll modules, making it easy to track spending down to the sub-department level.
Nienkamper uses the Accpac HR module for maintaining employee addresses, benefits information, birthdays, anniversaries, WSIB injury reporting , and employment equity tracking. It will soon deploy it for managing performance tracking and training records.
Positive Impact of Impac
The bottom-line benefits speak for themselves. “Our new system allowed us to increase production without adding staff companywide, and we support 185 employees with just two people in HR,“ Sanguinetti says.
The key to such a smooth system has been Nienkämper’s consultant. “Impac Solutions is incredibly amicable, and easy to work with. They do whatever we want to get the job done. When we ran two business systems in parallel for the first month, Impac was here by our side, helping any employee who needed extra attention or training,” says Sanguinetti.
“Impac understands the importance of our deadlines,” she continues. “I’m always astounded that they travel across the city, no matter what the weather, to help us. Once I needed new tax tables entered right away, and they worked over the weekend to get it done. In short, Impac is the most accommodating VAR I’ve ever worked with. They’ve never let us down.”
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