All Weather Windows produces 2,000 custom windows a day, but as the company was growing, it actually had to give up business because it was unable to deliver reliable order promises. With Oracle Flow Manufacturing and Supply Chain Planning 11i, All Weather has successfully transitioned to a just-in-time manufacturing model — and no longer needs to give up business to stay in business. Learn how All Weather: Implemented integrated management for complex orders — and eliminated data reentry. Increased shop floor safety with just-in-time processes. Reduced finished goods inventory by 60 percent.

As Published In February 2004

Manufacturing firm increases capacity, improves partner relationships with Oracle E-Business Suite.

Repeatedly telling your sales staff, "Go soft—we're having trouble making deliveries," is the stuff of nightmares for any manufacturing executive. That was the grim script at All Weather Windows when Gerald McLennan arrived as IT director in 2001. "We were at max capacity," he says. "We could not physically put any more orders into the system. Today the message is, 'Get out there—you're not selling enough.' We have capacity that we have yet to push the limits on."

All Weather Windows, based in Edmonton, Alberta, has tapped into national retailers, a large dealer network, and a growing export market to become Canada's largest privately owned manufacturer of doors and windows. A strong economy drove feverish growth through the mid-'90s, and in 1997 the company consolidated its scattered independent manufacturing facilities into one building.

"At that point, everything was driving toward one-center manufacturing, with the possibility of implementing machinery that needed computer software to drive it," says Executive Vice President Henry Banman. "It was a major turning point for us; we had momentum in the company and momentum in the industry."

One of the company's first efforts to incorporate technology into the operation, in the late '90s, ended badly with a vendor who withdrew support. "That was when we said, 'We're looking for stability and something that will be big enough to handle our growth,'" says Banman.

All Weather considered vendors serving companies with similar manufacturing needs, but recognized too many gaps on the front end, where the company wanted to tie a quote system into manufacturing. "We also wanted somebody who would have single-piece flow manufacturing," says Banman, who notes that All Weather's products are completely custom—no off-the-shelf products at all—with a volume of around 2,000 windows and doors per day.

By the year 2000, All Weather had decided on a phased implementation of applications from Oracle E-Business Suite, launching phase one with Oracle Payables, Purchasing, Inventory Control, Cash Management, and Assets. These tools provided accounting staff with real-time visibility into centralized financial and inventory data and provided the backbone for the integrated manufacturing applications to come.

In spring 2001, phase two got under way with an upgrade of existing Financials to Oracle E-Business Suite 11i, followed in January 2002 by the implementation of Oracle E-Business Suite products such as iReceivables and strategic modules from Oracle Manufacturing and Supply Chain Planning. A critical component of phase two was Order Fulfillment, which has dramatically improved the speed, accuracy, and responsiveness of the ordering process. One of the reasons All Weather chose Oracle E-Business Suite is the ease with which Oracle could integrate third-party quotation/configuration software into Order Fulfillment.

"Part of the point," says McLennan, "was getting all the knowledge on how to design windows out of people's heads and into that third-party quote package. It's not just a catalog. It's a physical design tool that generates bills of materials, cut lists, cut lengths, and other information that is capable of feeding process control equipment.

"As we moved through going live," he adds, "getting that integration meant that all of a sudden, all of our reentry went away. Now you have a salesman working with a customer, with a set of plans, configuring windows, and he's actually designing what the windows are going to look like. . . . What customers see is what flows into the system and gets made."

Since the company introduced the design-it-yourself concept to lumber yards and do-it-yourself retailers, 60 percent of sales in that market are the result of design-it-yourself orders. Banman reports that customer demand for his training sessions on product knowledge and configuration software more than doubled in 2003 from the previous year.

Snapshot All Weather Windows www.allweatherwindows.com All Weather Windows sells high-quality windows and doors across Canada and exports to the United States and overseas. The company boasts one of the broadest product lines of any Canadian manufacturer, offering Metal Clad Wood and PVC Vinyl windows, and is Canada's largest privately held window and door manufacturer. Year founded: 1978 Annual revuenues: About US$100 million Software: Oracle Database, Oracle E-Business Suite 11i, including Financials, Order Fulfillment, Supply Chain Planning, and Manufacturing; Microsoft Windows configuration software: Clearquote (All Weather Trademark) based on M2O (Made to Order) from Edgenet, Nashville Hardware: Database and application servers: IBM RS6000

All Weather has also experienced success in better managing its relationships with its partners. "One of the things that Oracle has given us the ability to do is know exactly how much material we're going to consume, based on every order we have in the system. We share that with some of our key vendors, and they're using it to plan their production," says McLennan.

In mid-2002, thanks to a more accurate ordering process across all markets, All Weather was able to close the doors on its 20,000-square-foot returned-goods retail operation. Increased accuracy also slashed the number of nonchargeable service calls by 80 percent, giving sales staff more time for strategic customer development calls. "Before we started this," says Banman, "one of our most ambitious salespeople made the $2 million club one year. This year, his goal is to do $7 million in sales."

With the implementation of Oracle Flow Manufacturing and Supply Chain Planning 11i, All Weather has transitioned to a just-in-time manufacturing model. In the past, the company built goods when an order came in, warehousing products until delivery, sometimes for months. "That's storage cost and capital cost," says McLennan. "And you usually built it on overtime because they said they needed it on that date." Now, with Oracle Manufacturing Scheduling, customers make an order when they've got the sale, and All Weather holds it until the customer really needs it and then builds it just in time, reducing finished goods inventory by 60 percent.

"When we started this conversion in 2001, our lead time was 25 working days and climbing," says McLennan. "Through 2002, after the go-live, we dropped that to about 21 days, and it fell to about 14 by the end of the year. We're now at 10 working days, and we can rush an order in eight days." Thanks to this tighter production timing, the company has all but eliminated overtime, significantly cut its inventory, and closed 80,000 square feet of warehousing across several branches.

Just-in-time manufacturing has increased throughput by 20 percent and increased by as much as 100 percent the amount of product that can be shipped immediately. It allows for better prediction of raw material supply needs, and reduces finished goods to almost half during peak times. This opens up floor space for new product lines, four of which were introduced in 2003.

Just-in-time manufacturing has also made the plant floor safer. "We're able to sort windows so we make the largest windows early in the shift while workers are still fresh," says McLennan. "By four in the afternoon, when they've been lifting windows for eight hours, they're lifting the smallest ones. We're now able to employ a much wider variety of people. We don't need the big, strong backs to do these jobs anymore. It's the same with glass. It gets robotically cut, moves down the line, and nobody touches it. You don't need someone with brawn. You need brains.

"We've managed to refocus the organization from survival to expanding production, quality, product lines, training, and service levels," says McLennan. "There are several Oracle modules we haven't implemented, and we're looking at a number of them as potentials: maybe the Warehouse Management system or iStore, where we want to look at the potential for much tighter integration of vendor-managed inventory."

Molly Rose Teuke's writing has appeared in Continental and the Chief Executive's Guide.