Over the past four to five years, the company has grown steadily, especially on the pet side of the business with sales increasingly rising among general and big box retailers as well as distributors worldwide. As a result, the fabricator decided to accommodate this ongoing growth and invest in its future by transitioning to the new Epicor enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, and is now actively working to update the system to the next level.
"We really didn't look beyond Epicor for our needs since we knew they were such a good fit," says Chip Rolfsen, ERP administrator, Mid-West Metal Products. "We made the move to Epicor ERP based on the desire to retrieve and review more information company wide through dashboards and reports. Our new goal is to leverage the technology platform to allow us to provide a better way of doing business."
Another objective was the establishment of metrics and benchmarks that could not be produced with the previous system. This included a wider variety of sales information and periodic volume reports providing greater sales, historic, and statistical details related to the company's line of pet products and manufacturing and production capabilities.
"Since going online with the Epicor ERP system in April 2014, we've identified several production inefficiencies, which enabled us to reduce labor costs by 20 percent, while increasing sales by 30 percent," explains Rolfsen. "This was achieved through the ability to slice and dice information and gain better insights into who is doing what and when. The solution revealed product lines that just weren't profitable in addition to items that not only sold well, but increased the bottom line."
To read further on the Mid-West Metal Products journey, check out their full story.
