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ERP System Implementation: Real-World Stories
By Liz Stevens, writer, Inside Rubber
Enterprise resource planning systems help manufacturers manage their entire operations, offering a broad suite of business management modules that are integrated, and that feature a cohesive look and consistent functionality. Typical ERP systems include modules for sales, procurement, production, distribution, accounting, human resources, corporate performance and customer services.
Inside Rubber talked with three companies about their ERP system implementations, including two companies that have completed their projects and one company that is poised to implement a new ERP package. The companies included ARPM member Gregg Reinmann, plant manager at Blair Rubber Company in Seville, Ohio; ARPM member Stephanie Hulme, plant manager at Bruckman Rubber Company in Hastings, Nebraska; and Bruce Weaver, manager at Columbia Rubber Mills in Clackamas, Oregon. Blair Rubber manufactures rubber lining systems for storage and transport vessels, and the company is slated to begin the switchover to a new ERP system. Bruckman Rubber is a manufacturer of rubber compounds and parts and completed its first ERP system implementation a year ago. Columbia Rubber specializes in producing rubber rollers, and recently completed the transition from one established ERP system to another.
Pick a Winner
Choosing the right ERP system is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Each rubber manufacturing plant has its own operational needs and unique characteristics. Every company exists at a particular level of digital maturity and need-toautomate. And all ERP system vendors offer a slew of complete packages, modular packages and add-on options. So there is no slam dunk; no one can say just pick this vendor and easy success is guaranteed. The three manufacturers were at different stages with their business operations technologies and cited different criteria for choosing their ERP systems.
Stephanie Hulme stated that Bruckman Rubber took the ERP plunge for the first time and that the company considered several packages, including NetSuite and JobBOSS, before deciding upon Global Shop Solutions. “We chose Global Shop Solutions for a lot of different reasons,” said Hulme, “But the biggest factor was that their system was a really
good budget maximizer. We got a lot of different features for the right amount of money. When it comes to ERP systems, you can spend a fortune and get everything you could ever dream of, more than you could even use. We didn’t want to fall into that trap, and that is why Global Shop Solutions really fit for us.” The ERP system is a modular one, but it is delivered with all modules built-in; users can choose to enable additional modules at their discretion.
Bruce Weaver’s recent ERP system implementation at Columbia Rubber was a switch from Infor’s VISUAL system to ECi Software Solutions’ JobBOSS. Weaver made the move away from VISUAL for a couple of reasons and chose JobBOSS based on another criterion. He was unhappy with the upgrade experience and the support he had received from Infor for its VISUAL ERP, which is based on Microsoft’s SQLServer Database. “We could not get good support for VISUAL,” said Weaver. “With that system, we would never do an upgrade because when you do an upgrade, you have massive problems. So we just never upgraded.” Columbia Rubber chose JobBOSS, said Weaver, for its ease of use. “We looked at other ERP systems, including the newer VISUAL,” he said. “JobBOSS just seemed to be the most intuitive; if you thought it could do it, it would do it.”
At Blair Rubber, the impetus to move to a new ERP system came from the corporate owners. “The corporation,” said Gregg Reinmann, “owns quite a few businesses. Among its 20 manufacturing sites, there are many different accounting or business systems.” That disparity of data sources makes it a heavy lift to pull all of the operational data together to judge plant performance and to see an overall corporate picture. “At our plant,” said Reinmann, “we cannot see ‘live’ financial results to fully understand how we are doing. With today’s circumstances and our market, it is really important to be able to have that feedback.” The corporation chose to consolidate operations by moving all plants to Oracle’s JD Edwards ERP system. Reinmann’s plant will be moving away from a combination of an SDI database and ECi Software Solutions’ Macola ERP system. Reinmann has been through ERP implementations in the past and expects the JD Edwards system to be functionally equivalent to Blair Rubber’s current systems.
Make the Move
The move from one computerized system to another usually includes migrating working and historical data from the old system to the new one. In some cases, plants turn to the software vendor to handle the entire data migration project; in other cases, the plants will be responsible for surveying their old systems, extracting the data to be moved to the new system and getting that old data into the proper format for the new software package. In Blair Rubber’s migration of Oracle and Macola data to an Oracle JD Edwards ERP system, the software vendor will have responsibility. “I don’t anticipate any problems with that,” said Reinmann. “We do have some extra complexity at our site. Our operation includes tracking lot control and shelf life for chemicals. Those two extra layers of management in the database are very important for our business. We are making sure that JD Edwards has the module complexity to handle our requirements.”
At Bruckman Rubber, Hulme and her colleagues handled the data extraction, consolidation and reformatting to move data from multiple sources to the new Global Shop Solutions system. “We did have a lot of database stuff,” said Hulme, “like our work instructions and our standard rates. The biggest part of the implementation was probably preparing that data and getting it into the right format and in tables to migrate it.” Hulme, however, got substantial support from her software vendor. “They had good support for that, to get the data migrated. We did a lot of testing. It was a matter of extract and convert the data, send it to the new ERP system, see what it looks like, identify what didn’t work, modify the converted data, remigrate and retest.” Hulme gives Global Shop Solutions big praise for their support. “Once we submitted a PO to get our ERP system purchase going, we got a whole implementation team to help get us through the process.”
For Columbia Rubber, the data migration from VISUAL to JobBOSS went well. “It wasn’t 100% flawless,” said Weaver. “We had to make some tweaks here and there, but we could put the data into in a spreadsheet and tweak it. And then, for the most part, the data was all there in the new system.”
Get Comfortable
Once a company makes the switch and the migration to a new ERP system, there is a period of getting to know the new system, finding its limitations and discovering its capabilities.
There were a few bumps in the road for Weaver as he and Columbia Rubber settled in with JobBOSS. “There was a little bit of a glitch in the accounting side,” said Weaver. “There were times when we said where did you get that number? That’s not what was in the old system.” Weaver also found some new report-oriented features that were helpful, but which were inconsistent. “When you run a report, you can click on an order number and automatically be shown order information. But it doesn’t happen on all of the reports, so it’s a little frustrating until you learn which reports have that feature and which ones don’t.”
For Bruckman Rubber, getting comfortable with their new Global Shop Solutions system yielded an unexpected benefit
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that, at first, seemed mysterious and disconcerting. “We knew the reason we wanted an ERP system,” said Hulme, “We wanted to have a single source of data rather than multiple databases.” Consolidating those sources of data, however, offered different operational realities than Hulme and her crew had observed before the transition.
“For instance,” described Hulme, “last month the quality report came out from the Global Shop and it seemed higher than normal. We are pretty steady with a 3% reject rate across the board, but last month it was 5%. That was a big jump, and it seems to have been steadily increasing. Our assumption was that something was going on in production, that we are creating more scrap. But when we looked at the current data compared to what was available to us a year ago, the picture was different.” After some head-scratching, Hulme realized that the company’s prior reports were not accounting for all of the important factors. “With the new system,” she said, “things that we weren’t even tracking before are now included in the metric. We had to shift our thinking. Watching the reject rate climb felt uncomfortable but, really, we were finally seeing the whole picture. And now we know what to tackle to address the problem.”
For Reinmann, part of getting comfortable with a new ERP system will mean getting users knowledgeable about the data it contains and comfortable with extracting good data for decision-making. Reinmann compared approaching a new ERP system to opening up a new book. “When you open a book to page one, you can’t know what is in, for instance, chapter four. Unless someone tells you about the kinds of things you’ll find later in the book, you are left with only the impression you got from page one.”
“If someone is starting from zero with a team that is going to use this ERP system,” said Reinmann, “you have to show them how to get the information, how to display the information, and how to convert it into a valuable tool for decision making. You can throw all kinds of numbers and information inside of a database; it doesn’t help you do anything unless the user knows how to use that data.”
Reinmann reflected on a past scenario at his company with their Macola ERP system. “We had Macola for many years and very few people used the information that was there,” he said. “When we decided to go all in with lot control, barcoding, location and shelf life controls, some people jumped in and utilized the Macola tools that helped extract information; others quickly gave up on the project because they found it frustrating. They didn’t know what was on page 20 in chapter four of our ‘ERP book’; nobody had shown them that information.” Reinmann described this as his company losing out on the capacity of its ERP. A software implementer had come in and installed the system, gave the users a .pdf with basic instructions, and then walked away. “That leaves the new users on page one,” said Reinmann, “without being told that there is a whole book here that’s full of valuable stuff.” According to Reinmann, it’s important to have software vendors provide enough training to introduce the new system’s capabilities and it’s equally important for new users to dive in and explore those new capabilities.
Branch Out
With some ERP systems, the vendor’s entire suite of business modules is available from the start. Other ERP systems are configured so that users pay for and add on new modules when ready to expand their use. At Columbia Rubber, Weaver may one day add a quality module to his JobBOSS system. A planning module is also available, but Weaver does not expect to add that to the system.
At Bruckman Rubber, Hulme is looking forward to making use of more of the company’s Global Shop Solutions ERP system. “We use the accounting and the manufacturing modules,” she said, “but we don’t really lean too much into the quality modules. I am excited to start focusing on that now that we have been using the system for a year.” Hulme explained that the team at Bruckman had learned enough about the system to get by for this first year, but now that people are comfortable with getting their basic work done, the plan is to focus on training and learning more about the different available features. “For instance,” said Hulme, “there is a scheduling piece but we haven’t really allowed the ERP to do much of the automated scheduling that it can do. My goal as plant manager is to get that going here in the
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next year. I want to really start looking at how the supply and demand side of production affects our rates and let the ERP system manage more of that.”
Remember This
As for parting advice, Gregg Reinmann reiterated the importance of thoroughly understanding the data that is the foundation populating any company’s ERP investment, and the importance of doing more than scratching the surface of what an ERP system can do. “If you don’t open that book, then you’ll never know what’s on page two,” said Reinmann. “That would be my advice and what I would caution folks. You need to have a good overview of the system given to you. And I think the word explore as a verb is really important. You simply have got to go, get in there, and do it.”
In Hulme’s experience, ERP implementation success rests on two main pillars: Excellent vendor support and strong ERP buy-in from the plant. “The support was great at Global Shop Solutions; I cannot stress that enough,” said Hulme. Bruckman Rubber does not have an IT department and Hulme knew that the company would need a lot of support from an ERP vendor. And Global Shop Solutions delivered the goods. “We were assigned a team lead,” said Hulme, “and we also had an operations consultant and a financial consultant.” To start, either the operations consultant or the financial consultant would visit Bruckman Rubber every couple of weeks, to walk through the migration-implementation process, or to help with general ledger and accounting setup in the new system. “At go live, we had the whole team here from Global Shop Solutions helping us.”
As for plant buy-in for an ERP system implementation, said Hulme, “I think our biggest struggle probably is still the buyin from Bruckman. We had a lot of key players who knew this was the right choice, that this is what we needed to do. But we had some employees – some operator level, some management level – who just weren’t completely bought into it, and I cannot stress enough how important it is to have buyin from all levels of the organization.”
Weaver offered some parting wisdom from Columbia Rubber. “Just take your time,” he said. “Don’t be in a hurry. If you can get a sample program, do it and see how it runs. Put some of your data in it so you know it all runs. But just don’t be in a hurry because you will regret it. If you think it is going to take you three months, take nine months instead.” u
