Union is one of the leading brands for home appliances here in the Philippines for more than 50 years having started in 1960. Beginning with the humble electric fan, we have grown our product line over the years to include several other major appliance products Filipinos look for. And while we are proud of our long history, we are continually looking towards the future to find more ways to help Filipinos run their homes better. We strive to deliver innovative products that aren’t just reliable and long-lasting, but are able to provide something more than your usual household appliance.

What was your ERPNext implementation journey like?

We came from standalone custom-built Windows programs used mainly for documentation. We adopted a Windows-based networked SMB system but after quickly growing out of that, we realized we needed a system that was more flexible and location-agnostic, i.e. cloud-based. We found ERPNext and loved the idea of open-source. So we rolled out ERPNext among our employees across different teams.

The benefits of cross-location automation happened when we: (1) computerized our processes, resulting in more accurate analytics of our business results and issues, (2) ERPNext brought about a huge improvement in allowing us to roll-out our system and business processes to off-site locations without the headache of setting up additional servers and managing network infrastructure. Because of this we have aligned how we do things regardless of site location.

What are the business challenges which you face? How do you overcome them?

Our main challenge is growing our appliance brands. We overcome this by understanding how our products perform. We use ERPNext for this kind of analysis so we understand product profitability, inventory turns, and customer purchase behavior.

Inter-department communication: Using ERPNext and other communication tools helps keep this real-time and reduce confusion

What do you like about ERPNext?

1. Addresses the main areas that we wanted to automate: sales, product management and supply chain and HR
2. Ease of deployment allows us to move faster
3. Flexibility of the system to meet our custom processes means we can adopt rather than just wait for a solution to come down the road
4. Strong permissions system means we can roll out to more users based on individual needs
5. Open-source means we are not forced to stick with one IT vendor
6. Very responsive development team (so we stick with the main developers Frappe anyway)

Does ERPNext make any difference to the way you do business?

ERPNext has contributed greatly to a culture of transparency so we can focus on delivering value and solving business problems. Instead of spending scarce time and resources on questions like "what happened?" and "where do we find the details?" - which ERPNext helps greatly in, we can focus on "how do we solve this?" and delight our customers.

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