HI-Rel Corporation Selects Beach AccessWritten by Rocky Smolin
E-Z-MRP, leading manufacturing software system for small manufacturers, announced a new pricing and product structure. According to Rocky Smolin, founder of Beach Access Software, makers of E-Z-MRP, “We see a distinction between those small manufacturers with less than five hundred parts in material resource planning, and those with a need for virtually unlimited part numbers.”Companies like Hi-Rel Corporation have utilized this delineation recently by leasing E-Z MRP system for manufacturers with more than 500 parts. According to Jerry Stouffer, “It made sense given our cash flow and I would recommend E-Z-MRP to other small manufacturers because support is excellent and product is easy to work with.” Stouffer did suggest that manufacturers looking for a customer relations management module should look at something else. However he was impressed with, “…How fast it (E-Z-MRP) calculates our requirements. I have 800 items in database and it only takes 20 seconds.” Small manufacturers with more than about a hundred parts can no longer manage manufacturing process manually or on an Excel spreadsheet. Since more than 84% of all manufacturers have less than fifty employees, there is a remarkable opportunity for cost-effective manufacturing systems like E-Z-MRP. Despite extensive media coverage regarding ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), in most cases these small manufacturers do not require all functionality offered, nor can many afford price point.
| | Michigan’s B&K Corporation Drops Old ERP system in Favor of ETO ERP Leader EncompixWritten by Roger Meloy
B&K Corporation has two Michigan manufacturing plants, one in Fenton and one in Saginaw. The company founded in 1952 recently transformed their technology process by implementing ETO (Engineer-to-Order) ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Leader Encompix, based in Cincinnati, OH.Kurt Kuck, CFO for B&K shared some of operational challenges company faced on a daily basis prior to Encompix implementation. Kuck noted, “We are a special order business. Every order we get is different in some regard, but many of our machines have some commonality to them. Our tendency was that when we received a new order, we had not simplified method of identifying what we could use from previous orders. That approach just added to cost. What was needed was some standardization.” Kuck also on lack of efficiency in old Syteline system from Symix (now Infor Global Systems). “Syteline was fine for tracking material and labor costs. But what was lacking was capability to bring it all together into a job cost system that we could use for percentage of completion.” Kuck noted they did not have a real time system. It was a very paper intensive system. The company would go into monthly job cost meetings that lasted hours and with three inch books of paper with all project budget recaps. The Syteline data was three weeks old.
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