The Situation

For Orchid International’s VP of Engineering/Operations, Tim Bryan, functionality, cost, and hardware platform were the primary criteria upon which he would select an ERP solution, and he evaluated hundreds. At the time, in early 2000, Mr. Bryan oversaw the operations in 5 plants, each of which was operating on a different ERP solution, and none of which were integrated. The five plants also operated in a variety of manufacturing environments: repetitive, flow and work order. He knew Orchid needed a single ERP solution that could adapt to any of these environments, be implemented across all five enterprises and managed on a day-to-day basis by his company’s lean IT staff, consisting of him and two others. Equally critical are the demands placed on Orchid by its diverse customer base, which operates in a wide cross-section of industries including automotive, consumer products, appliances, HVAC, lawn & garden, heavy industrial, electric motor, lighting and electronic. As a tier one or tier two supplier in these industries, Orchid must meet exceedingly stringent on time delivery and order accuracy requirements. Included in Orchid’s customer portfolio are such high profile customers as General Electric, John Deere, and Toshiba, as well as nearly twenty companies in the automotive supply chain, including Johnson Controls.
 
The Solution

In Solarsoft iVP, Mr. Bryan found an affordable, fully integrated ERPsolution that could meet all his requirements out-of-the-box. The biggest hurdle derailing any predilection Mr. Bryan might have had toward selecting Solarsoft iVP, which runs exclusively on the IBM System i, was hardware. Orchid had never before seen a system i, and selecting Solarsoft iVP was going to require a complete architectural change for the company. That concern was overcome when Mr. Bryan and his colleagues saw the System i’s operating system, which looked strikingly similar to a Windows NT environment. “Once we got past that box scenario, Solarsoft came to the top of the list in terms of functionality for the price. And that’s key for us,” says Mr. Bryan. In 2002, Orchid selected iVP.

Implementation Milestone

Within the past year, the company marked a milestone – the last of its five plants went “live” with iVP. That facility, in Mt. Juliet, TN, opened in 1994 and is Orchid’s original plant - a supplier of metal-stamped parts to dozens of major OEMs, from GE to John Deere. In 2004, the company purchased a facility in Monroe, WI, which  produces lamination stampings and die-cast productsto a growing host of motor and lighting manufacturers. The plant was using a legacy ERP System, and Orchid was going to have to pay a hefty monthly fee to stay on the license, so the company decided they needed to migrate to a new system as quickly as possible.

Likewise, the McAllen, TX facility,which supplies laminations and die-casting products to GE’s Mexico operations, had a pressing need for a true enterprise-wide ERP solution, as its operations were dependent upon a simple database system. Mr. Bryan, a strong advocate of phased-in ERP implementation, started his Mt. Juliet plant’s implementation with iVP’s accounting, order entry, EDI and shipping and progressed through inventory, PO, receiving and MRP, production and scheduling for last.

 "I have 3 people in my department for 6 locations, so we have to be very modular on how we cut-in things.” In fact, though certainly not typical of Solarsoft customers, Mr. Bryant and one of his IT colleagues have been known to implement iVP modules themselves. “That tells me that iVP is not so overly complex that you need a module expert for every module in order to even begin to think you can implement,” he says. “We implemented iVP in our Monroe plant, and users are telling me that Solarsoft iVP has more functionality – that they are actually using – than the previous system."

Complete System Implementation

Now, utilizing Solarsoft iVP with very few modifications and minimal third party software, all of Orchid’s facilities, with approximately 500 employees, 700 suppliers and 250 customers, manage their enterprises’ front office and varying shop-floor processes. Says Bryan, “We stay within 98% of iVP, but we’ll create a few little (customized) hooks.” With so many trading partners, many of them small and not functionally EDI capable, Orchid utilizes  Solarsoft’s Easy e-Business Suite. This tool allows realtime collaboration with suppliers and customers, who access a secure website to report shipment details or check order status, for example. “We call it the ‘Poor Man’s ASN’,” says Bryan. “They (customers) might not be able to accept an ASN, but they still want an e-mail of their packing list. Without the Easy e-Business Suite we’d have to go to a machine, scan the packing list, attach that file to an e-mail, pull up our customer list and e-mail it off. Now we just go to the customer contact list in Solarsoft, populate those e-mails directly from information within Solarsoft and send it off.”

Noting iVP’s integrated EDI, Radio Frequency (RF) Scanning and Serialized Bar Code Scanning capabilities, Bryan reinforces the importance of integration for Orchid. “Third-party software is not going to fly for us. I’m not going to fight those battles between the RF software provider and the ERP provider.” But beyond that, “I’ll go to any facility and walk through their flow from EDI through shipping, and if they’re not doing integrated bar-code scanning verification at the serialization level, their inventory accuracy can only be a fraction as good as what we’ve got.”

Inventory accuracy at the Mt. Juliet facility has always been good, despite the labor-intensive environment necessitated by their  previous ERP solution. The difference now, according to Mr.Bryan, is that with iVP’s integrated RF, Bar-Code Scanning and Serialization functionality, inventory accuracy has never been better and inventory management never so automated. With iVP’s integrated RF and bar-code serialization, “I do one scan - at point of use - I don’t wait until after I turn it (the bar code label) in. Our supervisor said our inventory has never been better.” He provides an anecdote to reinforce his point. “We picked our cut-over to Solarsoft during the middle of a full physical inventory.

Think about that; what’s the risk profile of being wrong when the auditor comes out for the audit and you’ve just cut-over to a brand new ERP system three days before?” He continues, “Well, the auditor pulled 45 finished bins, and with the RF gun and a piece of paper scanned and counted every one of them. Every single bin matched- 3 days after cut-over – and we move 200-300 bins per day, so we’d done quite a few transactions. The system was easy enough to use, and the people followed the procedures, such that we had absolutely no inventory problems.”

Improved Shipping Accuracy

“Prior to having Solarsoft, we had to key and scan any given BIN, QUANTITY and PART at two different locations, so there was an opportunity for error at any of those six input transactions,” Mr. Bryan explains. “With Solarsoft iVP’s serialization we’re scanning one number. It has to match. I don’t have any chance of inputting the wrong quantity or bin or part. When I scan the serial number, the serialization knows where that bin is physically located. There is no inventory accuracy lag. That’s why I’m very big on serialization and the RF. I’ve been through it all, trust me.” Mr. Bryan is getting the information he needs in real time with Solarsoft’s open architecture approach, with the master data, the control of the data, the  storage of the data all residing in a Solarsoft iVP DB2 database.

Now, Mr. Bryan’s IT group maintains a much more robust support structure for Orchid’s manufacturing environment, with dual System i boxes kept in separate rooms; one maintained as a back-up. “The architecture is extremely robust. I have not been down due to the box or a Solarsoft software glitch one time in 5 years,” he points out. “Reliability is critical to a manufacturing environment. I can’t be fighting a box going up and down, or software going into a glitch mode that takes down a facility or the whole company. We never touch the box.

Accessibility

For any organization managing their ERP solution with a lean IT staff, remote access is key. That access is one of Solarsoft’s biggest advantages, according to Mr. Bryan. “We do everything remotely on Solarsoft,” he says. “I can go to any PC and I can get on iVP, given that I know the IP address and security codes. I don’t have to load software. I go to an internet site that I have set up. We have people working from home all the time. It’s so convenient. At my level, I want to keep it as simple as possible, and the whole Solarsoft approach, from its accessibility to its integrated architecture and reliability makes it a very easy system to manage.”