Interview with a PlanetOne ERP customer: Carpet Maker (Thailand) Co., Ltd.

Dr. Kritsana Sukboonyasathit CEO, Carpet Maker (Thailand) Co., Ltd. and the Inter Krai group of companies

BRID: Dr. Kritsana, could you introduce yourself?

Hello, I’m Kritsana Sukboonyasathit, CEO of Carpet Maker (Thailand) and the Inter Krai group of companies.

This year marks my 20th year working at Carpet Maker.

BRID: Could you introduce the company, its origins, and its business model?

Carpet Maker (Thailand) makes hand-woven carpets, exporting to leading companies abroad such as 5–6 star hotels and fashion shops — the kind we all know that sell bags or various fashion brands. We supply yachts, private jets, and even palaces. These are the products we export from Ban Phai, Ban Phai District, Khon Kaen Province. All of our staff are Thai.

It started forty years ago with about 7 staff; today we have nearly 700. Our main product is hand-woven carpets because we wanted to create jobs, from the founder’s resolve to create work for the people of Khon Kaen and the people of Isan, who live in an area with quite a large population but where we had no factory.

They had to migrate to work in Bangkok or Chonburi, leaving their families with only the children staying with their grandparents. The quality of life for staff who had to live in tiny rooms and leave their families behind — that was the origin of why we set up the factory in Ban Phai District, where 40 years ago there were no factories at all. The factory here was the first.

BRID: What were the factors that led you to start considering implementing an ERP system for the organisation?

These days we’ve started doing more marketing in Thailand, because we felt that few people here knew us, whereas abroad people know us because we’ve been doing this for many years.

In Thailand itself, once we started, we began to need detail — there were activities that differed from our usual export activities — which made us start to think that really we needed a suitable back-office system.

In the past, from the very beginning we bought a simple accounting software for just a few thousand baht, because we thought it was just for recording the accounts and submitting the financials. But one advantage of ours is that we have a single set of financials — we don’t keep multiple sets — so it seemed easy.

But as the transactions grew larger and the business grew larger, there started to be analysis that we wanted to do and to see the picture of operations faster. Otherwise it only answered one need: being able to submit the financials to the authorities.

But later we thought that if we were going to grow, set strategy, and need data — we wanted data that was fast, accurate, and could be analysed from various angles — which led us to start looking for a more capable program that could meet detailed needs.

We studied several programs, and finally came across PlanetOne by BRID. We liked that it’s a Thai program, reasonably priced for us as an SME. Otherwise, if we’d gone with a big foreign system, it would surely have been in the tens of millions, and we weren’t sure it would meet our needs. But PlanetOne was at a price we could manage within our budget.

The advantage of the system that we saw is that it understands being Thai, understands the transactions, and understands Thai behaviour better than foreigners do. Foreign-designed systems are designed to support the nature, way of thinking, working patterns, and working style of foreigners, whereas Thais sometimes need not too much flexibility — which turns out to be an advantage.

BRID: Could you share your experience of implementing and using the ERP system for managing the organisation, for our readers?

At first we felt the program locked us down quite a lot, but it turned out to be good once we used it, because it stops staff from carelessly making an entry and then deleting it and redoing it, going back to redo it.

This is an advantage of the system, because it helps staff have the discipline to think carefully and be sure of all the details before making a transaction — because making those details may no longer be editable, and the matter would then have to be brought to a supervisor or manager to be aware of. I think this is an advantage of the system.

And developing the way of working together with the team, starting from redesigning the structure of the accounting system, thinking about what things should be rather than what they are — and the program is flexible to be written to genuinely respond to the nature of our business.

Because there aren’t many carpet businesses in Thailand. With a trading business or other manufacturing businesses, they’d have general modules that work. But for ours, which has quite a lot of detail and where we are a customised carpet — that is, produced to the customer’s order, with each piece completely different — the bill of material details are all different. The difficulty and detail of the transactions are great.

So we sat down and talked with the development team, set up the system together, and adjusted the program to fit what is.

In the early period there was quite a bit of adjusting to each other. We tried to have the development team learn what is first, and tried to tell them what we needed and where we’d meet, because sometimes if our needs were entirely met it would become as if there were no system at all, which isn’t good either. So we thought — ah, the right point.

So we also benefited from the perspectives and ideas of BRID’s development team, who came to advise that for this part you should use this method, or you should adjust. There were some cases where supplementary API programs had to be built, but today we’ve used BRID for many years and everything fits. We can close the books faster.

We can see the financial statements faster, and we can see deeper down to the GP Report. We can tell whether the problematic part of the work on each order, on each job, comes from the material, labour, or overhead part, or which part — which leads us to faster improvements.

BRID: How has the after-sales service and technical support from PlanetOne ERP been?

On the matter of after-sales service, I have to say that today we’ve talked with BRID to the point of becoming friends. Whatever comes up, we can get in touch. Khun Jane came to help discuss from the very beginning, and today Khun Jane still looks after us. And there’s Khun Nok, and a team we talk with, and the team can connect through the JTrac contact system, which lets us track where each piece of work stands.

And maybe it’s because lately the issues have decreased — but going back to the early period, the team supported us fully.

The team flew to Khon Kaen to talk and to sit down and reach conclusions. There were Zoom calls and appointments to work together many times in the early period, but now it’s less because everything has become smoother.

BRID: Advice for those looking for an ERP system as a tool for managing their organisation?

If I were to recommend finding a program where we won’t be abandoned, PlanetOne would be that program — the support, having a service team that gives peace of mind and helps us at all times.

This is an important matter for an organisation looking for a piece of software that meets its needs. We’d like to recommend PlanetOne as one option.

I should say that when we did our homework, we didn’t do homework on just one program — we studied several, and we found that there isn’t any single best program, but PlanetOne would meet our needs the closest and could be adjusted, coming the closest to us, so we decided to choose it.

By budget, and by our necessity too — because some things have lots of features that we don’t use. So what PlanetOne has, the budget, the service — for Carpet Maker, choosing PlanetOne was a decision we genuinely didn’t get wrong.