MISys Manufacturing Case Study

“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.