Lim Kee Food Manufacturing Pte Ltd 

Dim Sim maker in a Chinese oriented environment finds a cultural fit in the bilingual e-Solution Business Suite. 

Company Background

Lim Kee Food Manufacturing Pte Ltd is in the food manufacturing business, focusing on traditional Chinese dim sum (snacks) such as steamed pau (buns), siew mai (dumplings) and lor mai kai (glutinous rice with chicken).  The company manufactures these products in-house and distributes them through its established channels including neighborhood coffee shops, convenience stores, food courts, canteen operators and country clubs.  To compete with other dim sum suppliers for market share, Lim Kee has exclusive supply arrangements with some of its customers and even supply them with complimentary steamers for fresh-keeping its products.

Lim Kee hires a team of 45 dedicated employees in its manufacturing, sales and accounts departments.  Orders from its customers are communicated to Lim Kee through telephone or given to its delivery cum sales reps.

Business Challenge

Lim Kee’s previous system was a DOS-based accounting system that is not Y2K compliant.  A further shortcoming of the system is that its accounting module is not integrated to the billing module and thus requires manual entry to update its accounts receivable, in order to generate monthly statement of account for its customers.  This problem is further magnified by the high volume of daily transactions that makes data entry a repetitive and error prone task.

System Overhaul

In 1999, Lim Kee initiated a major system overhaul to replace its old system completely.  It had two simple requirements – integrated billing and accounts receivable modules and bilingual language support, and the answer is in the e-Solution Business suite, the only software in the market that could meet these requirements at that time. 

Under the support of the LETAS funding scheme offered by the Singapore government, Lim Kee went ahead to implement the e-Solution Business Suite with accounting and distribution modules.         

e-Solution Business Suite’s integrated billing and accounting modules eliminated manual data entry as sales transactions are eventually reflected in the sales ledger in the accounting module.  Lim Kee’s accounts staffs no longer need to work overtime to get its monthly statement of account out to customers at the end of the month.   

While English is the official language for conducting business in Singapore, Lim Kee operates in a Chinese oriented environment, selling traditional Chinese dim sum to food businesses that are mostly owned by Chinese-speaking towkays.  Hence, what Lim Kee needs is a system that supports both English and Chinese languages to meet its unique business requirements. 

The bilingual toggle feature in the e-Solution Business Suite suits all of Lim Kee’s needs.  The scope of its bilingual support covers both user interface and important fields in the database such as product description and unit of measure, available in a single copy of the software.  Users can toggle between the English and Chinese interface with a click of a button.  In addition, this feature allows Lim Kee’s business documents such as delivery order and invoice to be designed and printed with both English and Chinese descriptions where appropriate.  Lim Kee’s previous system was able to provide support for Chinese characters with an additional piece of card plugged into every workstation.  However, as the workstations were upgraded, incompatibility problems and hardware conflicts began to show up. 

With the right software for its staff, Lim Kee was able to achieve smooth migration to the new system.  The e-Solution Business Suite also proved to be able to support Lim Kee’s transaction volume of 500 delivery orders and invoices a day, enabling Lim Kee to run its daily operation in a smooth and efficient manner.

Overview

Company:
Lim Kee Food Manufacturing Pte Ltd
 
Industry:
Food Industry.
 
Business Activities:
Manufacture and distribute traditional Chinese dim sum.
 
Business Challenge:
1. Integrate billing module with accounting module.
 

2. Bilingual language support for users.
 

3. Y2K issue.
 
Solutions Implemented:
Financial Management
Distribution Management
 
Program Used:
e-Solution Accounting
e-Solution Distribution