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 air-conditioning units. It's a competitive business and due to the high shipping costs of foam products, Merryweather Foam and its competitors typically locate and compete within a relatively small geographic area around customer plants. Merryweather Foam has three plants-in Ohio, Alabama, and a facility in New Mexico.
Integrated functionality required
As business pressures increased, Owner and President Bob McCune began to reevaluate the company's existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, which had a significant amount of third-party customized programming. McCune 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 Foam-needs that functionality 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,'" said McCune.
Epicor delivers
In the end, the integrated features and functions of Epicor CMS, combined with Epicor expertise as a turnkey provider of all implementation, education, maintenance and hardware services, differentiated them from the other ERP applications the company considered. "There was really nothing we could find that Epicor CMS didn't do right out of the box," said McCune.
Big challenges
Merryweather Foam faces unique operational challenges characteristic of both custom and repetitive manufacturers. While its 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 some of the most critical Epicor CMS functionalities.
Big benefits
Utilizing Epicor CMS integrated EDI and bar-code labeling features, Merryweather Foam 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 Foam and its customers to optimize productivity and minimize inventory and WIP.
"We used to forecast demand and production six 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 the Epicor CMS EDI integration and shop floor management feature, material requirements planning (MRP) harmonizes the flow of the thousands of different parts we schedule and fabricate. Our 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, Epicor CMS has turned out to be the ideal tool of choice for meeting that basic challenge.