Counselor Magazine May 2012 : Page 106Fastest-Growing Companies FASTEST-GROWING SUPPLIER Sunjoy Group By Betsy Cummings The growth seems almost too strong to believe. In less than five years, sales at Chicago-based Sunjoy ( asi/90154 ) have skyrocketed from $47,329 in 2007 to nearly $4.5 million in 2011. How? Its president Harrison Fu points to an integrated supply chain. Certainly other suppliers have that in place, too. What makes Sunjoy’s so effective? 106 #1 A supply chain nothing short of Apple’s, according to Fu. “We manage everything with great detail,” he says. While most suppliers try to assemble a supply chain linked with competent, reliable factories and business partners (working with dif-ferent companies from year to year), Sun-joy has focused on improving its supply chain members – not by leaving them for better ones, but by working with them to improve processes. “We deal with every-body on our supply chain as our business partners, and we help everybody grow,” Fu says. It’s a common tale of woe among sup-pliers: A factory in Asia, say, talks a big game and seems to offer what a supplier needs, and then suddenly delivers poorly constructed products. Certainly “this is the weakest link” when operating over-seas, Fu says. But “instead of changing from one factory to another, we chose to train the factories we are working with and help them to grow and understand the customers’ needs.” If that includes instructing a particular manufacturer to change glue types, then Sunjoy asks them to do that, setting the standards for which glues to use with which products. In addition, Fu says, every order is run through Sunjoy’s Total Quality Man-agement (TQM) standard. The company manages each manufacturer it works with, declining to carry any inventory and drop shipping directly “from our TQM station to the end-user’s dock.” All of these steps help the company ensure faster, better and less costly management of product manufactur-ing, Fu insists. That’s passed along to cus-tomers, which keeps them loyal and, in turn, coming back for reorders. To keep up with such explosive growth, the company realized that it would need more sophisticated systems to manage its global network. Suddenly an off-the-shelf CRM system wasn’t enough to handle the overabundance of orders. In 2010 Sunjoy began expanding on and standardizing its ERP system so that orders would be electronically viewable from the point of sale to delivery. Fu says the company built a customized ERP sys-tem with “nine steps to follow the orders, from the sales and service department in Chicago to the operation in Shanghai and Shenzhen,” along with shipping and delivery. MAY 2012 | COUNSELOR Publication List Using a screen reader? Click Here |
