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Since October 1999, J&H has been live on IFS Applications™, and this enterprise environment enables many of the value-added services that have allowed the company to grow in an increasingly competitive market. Configurator key
According to J&H Information Systems Supervisor Robby Johnson, the ability to easily configure complex production lines for customers to achieve specific end-product results—and use that configuration to drive orders of the correct machine tools—drives efficiencies from the sales process into accounting and beyond. “It was becoming more competitive in this industry,” Johnson said. “When you are buying machines that are manufactured in Japan, the lead times can be long and hard to predict. So the more exact your order and the fewer changes you need to make on that order, the quicker our customer can get up and running once they get that machine.” Rules-based configurators automatically check products being ordered for use together for compatibility and the ability to meet certain specifications. “The configurator was a big advantage,” Johnson said. “The rulesbased configurator makes it easier for many of our sales consultants to complete relatively complex tasks. They can build a quote document using the configurator and hand that to a customer. When the quote is accepted, that same document is entered into the accounting package as an order. “Previously, we had a text-based accounting system, and we would have to create an order in that system and then spit that out as a text file. We had a macro in Microsoft® Word that would import that text document and create the document that we would hand off to the customer.” When J&H implemented IFS Applications, configurator functionality was relatively new. It came through an application that IFS had purchased and later sold while hanging on to the functionality as a component in IFS Applications. “We are actually using the old Exactium offline configurator to build the machine that is quoted to a customer with any accessories and options,” Johnson said. “Once that becomes an order, it generates a text document that gets sent into IFS. The sales request starts off in IFS/Sales & Marketing™ and then goes into Exactium, and from Exactium gets send back into IFS Financials™ when it becomes an order. The integration between the two is really very tight.” In April 2000, IFS sold Exactium to Atlanta-based Pivital Corp., licensing back the configurator functionality, which appeared as part of the core IFS Applications package in IFS Applications 2004 and later versions.
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