Merryweather Foam
Case Study: Merryweather Foam
About The Company
Using the most obvious measures of company size, revenue and number of employees. Merryweather Foam would not be considered a “large” manufacturer. But in today’s supply chain environment, labels like “large” and “small” are certainly overly simplistic, particularly if one fails to understand that size is not a factor when it comes to the performance expectations trading partners have for their suppliers. With three plants and five hundred customers demanding 2,700 custom-manufactured parts, this distributor and fabricator of foam products is anything but “small”. Merryweather and its Owner/President, Bob McCune, confront many of the same supply chain issues as manufacturers fifty times larger, and many unique challenges as well.
The Barberton, Ohio-based company buys blocks and rolls of foam in bulk and fabricates them into wrapping, cushioning and packaging materials for a diverse range of industries, from products for the long term medical care industry to filters for window airconditioning units. It’s a competitive business. Due to the bulk of the foam product shipping costs are high, so Merryweather and its competitors typically locate and compete within a relatively small geographic area around customer plants. Merryweather has three plants in Ohio, Alabama and a facility New Mexico. As business pressures increased, McCune began to reevaluate his existing ERP software, which had a significant amount of third party customized programming, and he came to realize that, as important as an ERP solution’s functionality is, a company with a very small IT staff and budget – like Merryweather - needs that function to be integrated
into a single solution and provided by a single vendor. “The last thing I want to hear my ERP provider tell me is that they can’t provide support or maintenance on a particular piece of the solution because ‘it’s not our software,’” he said.
The Solution
In the end, the integrated feature/function of Solarsoft iVP, combined with Solarsoft’s expertise as a turnkey provider of all implementation, education, maintenance and hardware services, differentiated them from the other ERP application he considered. “There was really nothing I could find that Solarsoft iVP didn’t do right out of the box,” said McCune. Merryweather Foam faces unique operational challenges characteristic of both custom and repetitive manufacturers. While their customers demand custom parts and have complicated delivery schedules, most also have repeat orders, so the Order Processing, Customer Service, Shop-Floor Reporting and integrated EDI are a few of the most critical Solarsoft iVP functionalities. Utilizing Solarsoft iVP’s integrated EDI and bar-code labeling features,
Benefits & Results
Merryweather was able to shift the manpower of 2.5 people away from the task of manually inputting and printing labels to performing true value-added activities within the organization.
The integrated EDI also allows Merryweather and its customers to optimize productivity and minimize inventory and WIP. “It used to be that we and our customers would need to forecast demand and production 6 weeks ahead of time, which meant we had to inventory larger quantities of raw materials and warehouse a greater amount of finished goods inventory,” said McCune. “With Solarsoft iVP’s EDI integration and Shop Floor Management feature, MRP harmonizes the flow of the thousands of different parts we schedule and fabricate. Our work-in-progress (WIP) savings in just our Ohio and Alabama facilities alone are tremendous.”
Large or small, the basic challenge is the same for all manufacturers – managing supply chain relationships. For Merryweather Foam, a “small” company with “large” company issues, Solarsoft iVP has turned out to be the ideal tool of choice for meeting that basic challenge
