PRONTO North America Users Conference to feature Keynote Address: TR CutlerWritten by Tom Verzi
Peggy Smedley is editor of Start Magazine and will be addressing first annual PRONTO North America Users Conference on Thursday, May 5th. Smedley was recently profiled in Wall Street Journal and authored Mending Manufacturing, How America Can Manufacture its Survival. She is an award-winning journalist. Wednesday, May 4th, Thomas R. Cutler, CEO of TR Cutler, Inc., author of Manufacturers Public Relations and Media Guide, Associate Editor of Industrial Connection, and Contributing Editor to InMFG magazine will be addressing PRONTO North America Users Conference. Cutler is also founder of Manufacturing Media Consortium, a group of 2000 journalists writing about various aspects of manufacturing and industrial trends. PRONTO North America, (www.prontoerp.com) based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, is North American Master Distributor of PRONTO-Xi, a comprehensive software system allowing manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to effectively manage all phases of supply chain. Far beyond just another Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System, PRONTO-Xi’s financial and distribution applications are unique and have provided maximum return on investment for a wide variety of organizations since 1976.
| | B&K Overcomes Operational Challenges with Encompix ETO ERPWritten 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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