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“If you asked what would be
the perfect solution for our company, the business portal would be the
one. It hardly took any time for us to learn, and it’s completely
changed how we do business at Malibu Boats.” Paul Singer, Vice President, Sales
& Marketing |
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In
1982, Malibu Boats built 100 custom ski boats in a small shop in |
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overview |
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Country or Region
Industry
Manufacturing
Customer Profile
Malibu
Boats manufactures custom water sports boats in
Business Situation
Malibu Boats wanted to empower its employees and dealers to work more efficiently and provide better customer service by providing them with easy access to business information.
Solution
Malibu Boats deployed Business Portal in Microsoft Dynamics™ GP, which provides a single access point to business information simply by opening Microsoft® Internet Explorer®.
Benefits
§ Increasing communication
§ Automating processes
§ Reducing manufacturing time
§ Improving design innovation
Situation
There is a special blend of familial loyalty and profound pride among the more than 500 employees at Malibu Boats, a world leader in the manufacturing of high performance water sports boats. Here the company mantra: “Build the best boat possible. Enjoy your workplace. Give our owners the best value” is a way of life for employees whose average tenure at the company runs to 9 years.
Malibu Boats’ management believes in encouraging the
creativity of a workforce whose love of the job translates into a superlative
product and great customer service “We say it’s like a family here and the
difference about
Choosing the right software tools to help Malibu Boats’
employees manage business information is a case in point. The company enhanced
individual and departmental productivity after the deployment of Microsoft Dynamics™ GP, which helped its
employees improve their manufacturing, distribution, human resources, and
financial management processes. In addition, Malibu Boats managers wanted to
improve information flow throughout the company. They reasoned that the sale,
subsequent manufacturing, and delivery of custom-built boats require efficient
teamwork. Consequently, Malibu Boats began looking for a software solution to
facilitate the dissemination of business data between departments and among
employees. Not only would this streamline operations and reduce costs, but it
would make business information more accessible to Malibu Boats sales reps,
dealers, and employees at head office and in the manufacturing facilities. For
example, custo
mer service staff often had to stop
what they were doing and go and look through the company’s boat books—large
manuals or build documents that contain data about every boat model ever made
at
Malibu Boats managers also wanted to streamline manual processes by enabling easy, online access to the information required by all the staffers involved in a specific business process. For example, dealers and production staff at headquarters used paper order forms and the fax and phone to communicate. Confirming the particulars of each order required faxing paper back and forth and many follow-up phone calls, which left too much room for error. It took days or weeks to finalize orders and even then mistakes sometimes slipped through.
“In terms of fostering good customer relationships,
information is king,” says Mike Sanchez, Director, Customer Service and
Warranty at Malibu Boats. “The more you have, the more useful you are to the
customer. Today, with the Internet, customers are more educated and
communicative than ever. We have to empower our employees with access to the
information they need to answer customer questions, work more productively, and
foster positive relationships.”
Solution
Using Business Portal in Microsoft Dynamics GP, Malibu Boats deployed a Web-based information portal that integrates with Microsoft Dynamics GP to ensure that more employees could access and share business information. Malibu Boats employees and dealers are using the portal as a single point of entry for self-serve access to the valuable data housed in Microsoft Dynamics GP, including three years of sales data and all the boat books, large manuals that are the build documents for each model ever made at Malibu Boats.
Each department at Malibu Boats has a customizable site on the business portal, which contains information appropriate to that department, as well as Shared Documents. Each department ensured that its site provided easy access to the information they needed most to streamline business processes. Today, every department within Malibu Boats is using the portal to improve individual efficiency, teamwork, and customer service, in effect consolidating Malibu Boats’ intellectual capital for the overall benefit of the company.
“It was an easy transition to incorporating the business
portal in our daily work,” says Sanchez. “The IT department held some classes
and gave us simple para
meters
for customizing our sites. On the Customer Service site, we have a section
called Discussions, which is a forum for anyone in the company to help resolve
any customer service or warranty issues. Everyone is utilizing this technology
to make our jobs easier.”
Benefits
“Easy access to business information can almost always be translated into better customer service,” says Singer. “We’re using the portal to share information among staffers, dealers, and sales reps to sell, build, and deliver better boats more efficiently, improving customer service. We are also using it to share information with the customer, building better relationships.”
Increasing
Communication
Singer uses the portal to better manage marketing projects like creating DVDs, advertising campaigns, catalogues, commercials, and events. “We use the site to better manage marketing projects, so we no longer have more than one person working on the same thing,” he says. “Now we are disseminating market and sales information to the dealers, prospective customers, and our boat owners more efficiently. The portal also provides a three-year sales history, so I’m getting a better understanding of sales trends without having to go and look through a lot of paper.”
Singer is also responsible for communicating marketing and sales information from head office out to the sales reps so they can relay the information to the dealers. “That was our biggest challenge, getting information out to the field through phone calls and e-mails,” he recalls. “Now we can ensure that the dealers are supporting corporate branding at the retail level, because all the sales information, marketing updates, product announcements, are there on the portal.”
This is a big help to Chris Crysdale, Southern Region Sales Manager for Malibu Boats. “My goal as a rep is to give the dealers in my region as much information as I can,” he says. “Instead of acting as the middleman, phoning the dealers when they’re busy trying to make sales, I can just point them to the Dealers site on the portal. They can see product announcements, service notices, sales announcements, product catalogues, owners’ manuals, and warranties. There’s so much self-serve information there, we can all focus on selling more boats.”
Mike Sanchez used to be constantly on the phone and at the
fax machine, addressing a wide range of customer service issues. Now he and
members of the Customer Service and Warranty department are using the
Paul joined Malibu Boats when
he was 25, after a career as Staff Sergeant in the United States Air
Force, where he worked towards a Technical Management degree. He met
business portal to research and provide technical information
pertaining to any portion of any boat ever built at the company. “The business
portal has maximized the amount of information available to my staffers and
improved their ability to provide efficient, responsive service. We used to
have to look in the boat books,” he recalls. “Now we have all that information
in the Boat Database that we access through the portal with one click.”
Executive Biography
Automating Processes
Malibu Boats has also expedited customer service through
the portal’s online warranty service. Instead of mailing t
hem
in, customers can submit their warranty cards to
For Bruce Hower, Manager at
Hower is also saving time and improving accuracy while taking a customer’s order. Instead of faxing in handwritten forms, he’s using an automated online system available on the Dealers site to complete a customer’s order and upload it to the portal. “I order on average, 8 boats a month,” says Hower. “I sit down with the customer and get all the options right before I upload it. I’ve reduced the time it takes to finalize an order from one and half hours to a matter of minutes. I used to have to send boats back to manufacturing because we didn’t get the order exactly right. That doesn’t happen anymore.”
Hower also loves how he can print out a picture of the boat he’s just configured with a potential customer, providing a powerful take-away. “The business portal definitely helps close sales,” he confirms. “The customer puts that picture on his fridge, and suddenly, that boat is his! And when he places the order, I can tell him exactly where the boat is in production and when it will be shipped just by looking on the portal. It’s a very powerful tool.”
Reducing Manufacturing Time
Once an order reaches Kelley Aue, Production Coordinator
at
“Customers are interested in getting their boats exactly
as they ordered them, in time for the next long weekend,” says Barry Bennet,
Purchasing and Inventory Control Manager at Malibu Boats. “We use the portal to
help expedite that process and provide better customer satisfaction. Production
uses it to find part
availability and the warehouse uses it to
ensure they can supply production based on the pipeline. And R&D uses the
portal to share engineering change notices with manufacturing, a vital way of
communicating product innovation or manufacturing process improvements to
people working in the production department. Before, we got the news through
hallway discussions or e-mails. Now, each production department employee has a
better chance of getting the change right the first time rather than having to
rework a boat later. We are spending fewer hours per boat on rework. Overall,
quality goes up and costs go down.”
Improving Design Innovation
Right from the beginning, Malibu Boats’ reputation for new
production techniques and superlative engineering propelled the company to a
leading position in the world of water sports boat design.
“We are constantly absorbed in innovation, which is how we
crank out the most sought after water sports tow boat in the world,” confirms
Dan Gasper, Director of Research and Development at Malibu Boats. “We are so
focused on coming up with something ground-breaking, building it, testing it,
and then putting it into production, that we sometimes forget about typical
business practices. Often, our excitement would cause us to skip some vital
communication steps with the other departments at
“If you asked what would be the perfect solution for our
company, the business portal would be the one,” concludes Singer. “It hardly took any time for us to learn, and
it’s completely changed how we do business at Malibu Boats.”
Phone: (209) 383-7469 Web site: www.malibuboats.com A
people-ready business is one where people can apply their unique skills,
insights, and experience to create new products and services, work
responsively with customers and partners, and drive operational excellence
in every aspect of the business. People-Ready businesses support people
with knowledge, practices, and tools so that they can add the extra value
that helps differentiate successful organizations in a competitive,
fast-moving global economy. Microsoft Dynamics GP Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
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