For more than four decades, Gibson has rocked the music industry with its world-famous electric guitars, used by rock legends such as B.B. King and Led Zeppelin. The quality and innovation of Gibson’s products have set the standard in guitar manufacturing.

To meet growing customer demands, Gibson employed that same standard of quality and innovation into its financial and warehouse management systems by extending its Microsoft Dynamics GP business management solution to integrate with its warehouse management system (WMS). This integrated solution has helped Gibson gain a competitive edge with a state-of-the-art distribution system that enables it to provide superior customer service.

Situation
Previously, Gibson was running its warehouses on IBM AS/400 servers and using Oracle Financials at its corporate headquarters. These outdated systems could not integrate with each other to share vital financial and distribution information. With several thousand invoices to process each month, Gibson needed an innovative software solution that could integrate its financial and warehouse management systems (WMSs) to meet growing demands and stay competitive.

A small team in Gibson’s IT department operates as a consulting group within the company, functioning like a business solutions delivery team. Now Chief Information Officer Michael Johnson runs the business solutions IT team that drives the purchase, implementation, and support of software applications, including business analytics. With limited resources available to handle all these responsibilities, Gibson’s IT department operates near maximum capacity at all times. “It’s not as though you need a huge IT department in order to be successful doing what we’ve done,” comments Johnson. “I think that’s an important point to make, because a lot of people think that it requires more people and is more costly than it really is. You just have to have the right people and the right systems.”

Gibson needed a new system that would support the IT department’s mission to propel the growth of the company, and to continue to extend the footprint of its systems to generate revenue, control costs, and turn over assets to warrant the investment in the IT staff. As a result, Gibson began its search for a distribution technology system that would not require a lot of IT support and maintenance and that was familiar, easy to use, and cost effective.

Solution
After investigating their options, Gibson made the decision to upgrade and extend its Microsoft Dynamics™ GP solution based largely on the fact that the transition could be done in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost it would take to implement an alternative solution. In the summer of 2006, Gibson upgraded to Microsoft Dynamics GP 9.0. Now Gibson’s warehouses, spanning from Bozeman, Montana, to the Netherlands, manage their inventory as well as their order processing and invoicing functions through Microsoft Dynamics GP.

Michael Johnson played a key role in the implementation process. “I basically see us as having internal and external customers. We have applications our dealers use that integrate with Microsoft Dynamics GP. These applications also allow our customers to pay and apply credits to their invoices online. Each of those transactions generates cash receipts or application entries directly in Microsoft Dynamics GP, which is a big benefit,” says Johnson. Using Microsoft Dynamics GP, Gibson also supports a Web site where dealers, large and small, are able to enter orders, view their credit and accounts receivable information, look at a statement, check inventory stocking levels, set up event alerts, and check the status of orders that are currently being picked and ready for shipment. The site allows them to manage their relationship with Gibson online, saving both time and money while improving their customer relationships.

Because of the high number of customer and nontechnology-oriented end-users on Gibson’s Web site, having an interface that is familiar, predictable, and easy to use is critical for the company.

The Windows® interface played a big role in Gibson’s choice to extend and integrate its Microsoft Dynamics GP solution with Savant’s WMS. Johnson explains: “We’re kind of a unique company in that a lot of our users are musicians first. Most of our inside sales people, our marketing people, and a lot of our production supervisors are musicians first. They’re not systems guys. So if the system wasn’t easy to use, we wouldn’t be very functional. I don’t want to imply that our people aren’t sophisticated or intelligent, because they are. They’re just not all technology-oriented people, so that speaks to the ease of use of Microsoft Dynamics GP and how important that is to us.”

Benefits
Since extending its Microsoft Dynamics GP solution to meet its distribution requirements, Gibson is experiencing a wide variety of benefits in the areas of both warehouse management and customer service.

Operational Efficiencies
By employing the integrated functionality of Microsoft Dynamics GP, Gibson now has real-time insight into its inventory at every stage of production. This allows it to know exactly when finished goods will be available to ship. With this improved supply chain integration, Gibson can now do more sophisticated sales forecasting because employees can look at all the data, instead of fragments, to help them make more confident scheduling and business decisions. “We made a pretty distinct change to the way that we processed our data to integrate it with our warehouses in Europe,” says Johnson. “When we implemented the automated allocation system, it changed the way we needed Microsoft Dynamics GP to interact with our warehouse management system. At that point, we pulled out those integration components in Microsoft Dynamics GP and customized them with the WMS to meet our needs.”

Improved Customer Connections
With Sales Order Processing with Advanced Invoicing for Microsoft Dynamics GP now in place, Gibson’s order allocation process is now 100 percent automated, providing a faster and more accurate ordering and fulfillment process to its customers. The system allocates inventory to orders eliminating manual intervention and the potential for human error. “We don’t have to manually allocate the orders as the finished goods are adjusted into the warehouses from Microsoft Dynamics GP MRP Modules. The system automatically allocates inventory to the orders throughout the day and sends them to the WMS,” says Johnson. Using Sales Order Processing with Advanced Invoicing to do order fulfillment and invoicing has now become standard for all Gibson employees.

Competitive Offerings
Microsoft Dynamics GP is helping Gibson support its business model and keep its competitive edge by giving it real-time inventory, distribution, and shipping data. This up-to-the-minute data informs not only sales, distribution, and manufacturing, but also marketing and product development—enabling all departments to provide the latest products and services to meet and exceed customer demands. “What that allows us to do is to maintain and support both our largest customer and our smallest customer,” says Johnson. “With Microsoft Dynamics GP, we can control the business across all these different locations with absolute consistency and standardization so that all of our customers are treated with the same high level of service.”

Extensibility
Gibson has done a lot of extensibility work within Microsoft Dynamics GP using Modifier with Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA). Johnson explains: “We’ve used Microsoft Dynamics GP to build new user forms, modify Windows, and automate and streamline a lot of processes. Through ADO [ActiveX® Data Objects] and the connection to the SQL data layer, we can integrate Microsoft Dynamics GP with our own stored procedures and tables and other systems. We’ve really leveraged that to an extreme.” Using VBA and Crystal Web services has helped keep Gibson’s IT department lean, while still delivering customization capabilities to meet the company’s unique business needs. With Microsoft Dynamics GP, Gibson is establishing an infrastructure built on industry standard architecture and technology that will help it extend its investment and continue its legacy of innovation well into the future.

“We’re in the entertainment industry, so finding the next big ‘hit’ is critical. We look to analyze and collect information every day so that we can capitalize on new hits as they’re emerging, as well to extend the life of our existing products. We do that by looking at the data we collect through Microsoft Dynamics GP,”says Johnson.