Flexible system needed
Rapid order-to-delivery is what Hercules Sealing Products is all about. After all, its customers can’t wait. A call to Hercules often means that the customer’s high-dollar, revenue-generating equipment is down, and every day the customer waits for parts is a day’s worth of lost revenue. That’s why Hercules strives to, and has built its reputation on, next-day delivery for most orders. Maintaining that hard-earned reputation has been a growing challenge as the company itself has grown. Founded in 1962, Hercules has expanded to seven locations in the United States, including its headquarters in Clearwater, Florida, and four branches in Canada. In recent years, the company has added sites in Reno, Nevada, and Seattle, Washington, through acquisition. Because most of its customers are smaller companies, Hercules processes a large volume of small orders. “One of the business challenges we faced is that we were using fragmented systems to run our business,” said Hercules IT manager David Miller. “The Reno facility had its own legacy system while the rest of the company was running another one. And fragmented systems meant fragmented data.” Hercules’ systems could not supply the real-time information the company needed to maintain just-intime inventory for customers. Its systems also could not handle multiple currencies—a big stumbling block for a company that has branches in Canada and does business internationally. “For the most part, our legacy systems were well tuned to what we do,” Miller said. “But that proprietary nature was killing us. It seemed like every time we wanted to do something bigger and better and deeper, the systems got in the way. We needed a system that is open, flexible, and fully integrated.”
In search of a solution
The search for a new system began with 18 software vendors, which Hercules’ software evaluation team whittled down to four. The team prepared an intricate matrix of required functionality—everything from security to look and feel. As vendors gave demos of their products, team members tried to gain an in-depth understanding of each software package. Their final choice was IFS Applications™, a component-based enterprise software suite from IFS. “What swayed us most was the flexibility of the IFS system,” Miller said. “Our Reno facility does light manufacturing, some of it make-tostock but mostly make-to-order. IFS’ mixed-mode manufacturing solution was just what we needed. Plus IFS’ sales configurator could accommodate the many different options and variations of our products.” The implementation was a collaborative effort between Hercules, IFS, and IT consulting firm Tribridge. Hercules opted for a simultaneous deployment at its facilities in Clearwater, Reno, and Canada. To introduce the system to its employees, Hercules took a train-thetrainer approach: Power users were the first to be trained, and they trained the end users. To make the training as close to real life as possible, the trainers brought in actual orders from the previous day and let users process them in the new system. “The training was highly successful,” Miller said. “People understood their roles and how they interacted with the system. By the time the golive came around, it was just what we wanted it to be: a non-event.”
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