When Patrick Donnelly realized that his old IBM A/S
400 system, with General Ledger and a multitude of “count early and count
often” spreadsheets, was no longer adequate to the task of controlling his
manufacturing processes, he began a discovery process for new
Windows-based MRP products. “With our old system we could manage a simple
business, but we had grown to the point of being a complex business, on
the brink of growing out of control. I am convinced that without the MISys
functionality and ease of use, we’d be out of business today.”
Oak State Products
makes cookies. Lots of cookies, and lots of different types of cookies.
Oak State has over 400 Bills of Material (BOM---what we consumers would
call “recipes”) with over 1,000 different Items. Sales in 1999 were at $15
million with over 300 employees, a 150,000 square foot plant, and three
175-foot long ovens.
Oak State needed a
product that would provide a numbering system for all their Items and BOMs,
BOM revision control and history maintenance, an entry system for
Manufacturing Orders, and a process to reserve materials through those
Manufacturing Orders. In addition they required sophisticated
import/export functionality, the ability to “drill down” through the
historical steps and source documents of any order, and a complete
bar-coding system. It would have to be an easy to use Standard Costing
system and the price needed to promise a brisk return on investment (ROI).
At a price
one-quarter of the competition they looked at, MISys had all the features
they required. Oak State began to work with MISys and its companion ACCPAC
Advantage Series accounting system New Year’s Day 2000 (okay, it was
probably January 2nd). Patrick adds “When I look back at the
old systems and software, I’m not sure if we would still be in business
without MISys and ACCPAC. We now have more information about everything
from Inventory to Sales. The ability to import and export to and from
spreadsheets has made the creation of items, suppliers, BOM databases and
reports a snap. I’ve been amazed how easy this has been to implement and
customize for our specific needs, with virtually no additional costs post
installation.”
As one example of how
MISys has made life easier for Oak State, a demand was created for a list
of all BOMs associated with a specific item. What would have taken hours
to sort through BOM by BOM, Patrick accomplished in minutes by exporting
all of the BOMs sorted by item and quantity. “The ability to create
multiple revisions for all the formulas (BOMs) is perfect for building and
maintaining cookie formulas,” explains Patrick. “We have BOMs, with
revisions, for all the formulas and BOMs for the finished packaged goods.
Formula BOMs pull ingredients from inventory, and Finished Goods BOMs pull
all the packaging materials from inventory, with full costing
information.”
Patrick feels they
are still using only a third of what MISys can eventually provide. It’s a
part of every aspect of their business: “The formula BOMs generate mix
sheets that are used for every batch of cookies we mix. We also use MISys
along with bar-coding/scanning equipment to locate inventory items by
location…and we have over 1000 possible locations!” The bar-coding
hardware and software purchased from MISys cost one-tenth the price
offered by a third party vendor.
As Oak State Products
grew with MISys, it added the Master
Production Scheduling functionality
and now “produces daily reports for their MRP demands.” The reports they
use, part of a collection of customizable reports included with MISys, “close
the MRP loop for us” says Patrick. “We enter real orders, estimated orders
and forecast information. It looks at everything
and tells us what we have, what we need and when we’ll need it.”
Not willing to stand still on the capabilities of MISys for their company,
Oak State Products has recently added the MISys Serial/Lot Tracking module
to their environment which will allow them to better track and control
item lot quantities throughout their manufacturing processes.
The
payoff can be seen in all the ways MISys impacts the production processes,
but Patrick explains that it is far more than that. “It’s been fun to see
production people empowered with information that was unavailable before
MISys,” he said. “You can’t imagine what it does for morale when anyone
can see when an item was ordered and when it is scheduled to arrive.” He
adds “We felt we were taking a risk, as a company always does in selecting
a software vendor, and a bad choice might have been difficult to recover
from. We feel like we hit the jackpot with MISys.
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