ATNESIS Sdn. Bhd., a highly experienced locking system manufacturer in Malaysia, has been building a strong spirit of cooperation with Monitor since 2018.

The international manufacturer of a wide range of magnetic locks had sought out an ERP system to replace its existing solution three years ago. The new system had to be able to cover all key areas of its business, from operational tasks such as generating sales quotations, capacity planning, supply chain and warehouse management, production planning etc. to administrative tasks such as purchasing, invoicing, financial reporting, and data analytics using business intelligence.

MONITOR G4 met these needs, so three years down the road, upgrading to the latest version of the system – MONITOR G5 – was a logical step. As a user that utilizes almost 80% of MONITOR’s vast functionality, ATNESIS can expect greatly improved performance and a more user-friendly UI after the upgrade.

“The customer will see a great performance improvement when running Material Requirements Planning (MRP), which is 20 times faster compared to G4. This gives us the possibility to run MRP every 20 minutes in the background, without affecting performance for the users. Other than that, G5 is more capable of handling local tax requirements thanks to the Malaysia Country Package that was improved,” explains Alice, Project Manager for the ATNESIS G5 upgrade project.

She also pointed out that ATNESIS is the first customer to utilize the EIM (Electronic Invoice Management) option, that makes supplier invoice management much simpler. Managing multiple supplier invoices and accounts payable can all be done from within the system, electronically. Gone are the days of e-mails or printed documents disappearing when you need them most.

One unique aspect of this upgrade project is that it was the first ever G4 to G5 Machine Integration upgrade in the world. "Machine Integration is very powerful, and we are able to monitor our machine outputs and machine downtime precisely in real-time. Machine OEE can be viewed in real time, and this allows managers and supervisors to act and attend to problems immediately. In addition, we can also monitor live ‘Planned Cycle Time’ versus ‘Actual Reported Time’. This helps us to further improve our BOM accuracy.” Cynthia outlined the benefits of using Machine Integration to optimize its production flow, helping it to reach new levels of efficiency.

This was quite a challenging project to pull off, as it was carried out at the same time as two of ATNESIS' sister companies. The project took approximately one month to complete. When asked, our consultants put the success of the project down to good time management and having well-planned schedules for key tasks. However, full cooperation from the customer has always been a major factor in the success or failure of such implementation projects, and we were fortunate to get this from ATNESIS. Training sessions were also run simultaneously for all three of the companies, to save time and keep to the project timeline.

While the Monitor team faced their own set of challenges, the ATNESIS team also had issues to overcome during the upgrade project. Being used to G4, the ATNESIS staff needed some time to adjust to the new user interface (UI) in G5 and become familiar with some new ways of doing things. In between the challenges of migrating Machine Integration data and adjusting to the UI changes, Cynthia Khaw, Engineering Manager for ATNESIS as well as Project Manager for the upgrade project, mentioned that all in all, the upgrade project had gone smoothly, with minimal hiccups.

Monitor has proven to be a reliable technology partner for ATNESIS over the past three years. Our team of support staff and consultants have been working closely with the company to support and assist not only during projects, but also in answering general questions arising during its daily routine work. Being able to host online training sessions during the COVID-19 pandemic proved effective, and our customer found that it had greatly benefited their organization.

We put the success of each implementation project down to the relationships we build with our customers, and Monitor and ATNESIS have clearly formed a strong spirit of cooperation.