24 September 2009

Door and frame manufacturer NCHM used the ProvenSys enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from newCOMer to reduce costs and Improve efficiency.

Based in Little Rock, Arkansas, USA, National Custom Metal Doors and Frames (NCHM) is the leading company in customised fire-rated frames and doors. NCHM uses the ProvenSys enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from newCOMer, a member of the European Forum for Extended Usability (EF.EU), for customer relationship management, order management, invoicing, price calculation, production, warehouse management and timekeeping.

By using ProvenSys’s production papers and barcodes throughout the shop, NCHM has simplified production flow and control processes, while reducing the risk of incorrect information within various sections.

Barcoding is a key feature of ProvenSys, which is built on the philosophy that customers should never invest more money in data entry than the data itself is worth. For example, at NCHM, it wouldn’t make sense to track each welding electrode, but it is important to know how many hinges go into a frame. To this end, the company uses barcodes on a range of items, from employee tags to machine and SKU numbers, as well as in its warehouse. Now, a complete stock move transaction can be achieved with just a single scanning event, taking a few milliseconds.

Chris Mathews, president and CEO of NCHM, says that barcoding has reduced the time cost for data entry compared to the previous manual method. The solution is already saving him hundreds of dollars per month, because ProvenSys can print all shipping papers and invoices on plain paper instead of expensive printed forms.

Mathews decided on the German ERP solution because it was the only one in its price segment that could calculate all prices based on product characteristics inside an integrated formula interpreter. The flexibility of ProvenSys has enabled NCHM to set up a ‘SteelPricePerPound’ variable. This can be populated with the actual price per pound of stainless steel, and ProvenSys immediately calculates the related product prices of over 2,000 million different combinations of article variants.

ProvenSys ERP allows NCHM to model flexible parts lists within one article, and to make decisions based on formulas that can be set up by the customer within the system. Mathews is pleased with the system because it enables the implementation of new methods inside the formula interpreter, simply by writing source code out of Visual Studio for .NET in Visual Basic or any other language supported by .NET. As soon as the new formulas are registered inside ProvenSys, NCHM can use the new functions. Managers can run ProvenSys on their notebooks and gain insight into the production in real time, using only an Internet connection to the company server.

Carl Spitzenberger, CEO of newCOMer, who was present in Little Rock when the solution went live, was very pleased with the progress of ProvenSys in the US market, since more and more companies are asking for a flexible system which integrates all production and customer relationship aspects, such as the complete integration of all Microsoft Outlook e-mail traffic into the ERP system.

This article first appeared In the 2009/10 edition of the Prime Partner Guide.

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