Doing More with Less

Continued

Two years ago, Larry Barrett, director of operations and technology for specialty retailer Sage Manufacturing, was having similar growing pains. When Sage Manufacturing set out to upgrade its current IT infrastructure, it was using a commercial product to handle all of its accounts payable and inventory management tasks, but it wasn't a stable IT environment. The company's manufacturing, order management, and financial processes were handled by what Barrett calls "a hodgepodge" of software modules and manpower. And the software it did have wasn't working particularly well. As the company's fishing rod business continued to grow, it wasn't uncommon for the system to fail on peak shipping days. "The old system was really fragile," he says. "It needed a lot of technical attention. People were spending their days just trying to reboot databases, reboot boxes, just trying to keep the system moving forward."

Sage's IT staff was too busy managing the existing infrastructure to even begin to think about installing a new one, and adding to the overall head count wasn't an option.

Experiencing the same kinds of problems as Sage, Life Data Labs' Kutz decided to turn to one vendor. So he took a chance and contacted Oracle. In turn, Oracle connected him with a Marietta, Georgia-based consulting firm called SkyBridge Global. Almost immediately, Todd Murphy, vice president of business development at SkyBridge, confirmed that Oracle E-Business Suite could solve their software problems. The best part: everything would be integrated.

The Oracle E-Business Suite implementation has allowed the company to increase production without adding staff. For example, in the past the shipping process was so intense that even though the shipping cutoff was 10 a.m., there were days when the UPS truck had to wait for orders to be completed. Orders were hand-recorded on paper and keyed in manually. Then someone in the warehouse had to find and pull products, package them up, and put labels on them.

Today, the shipping cutoff is as late as 11 a.m., but because production has been speeded up, the UPS person arrives to find a pallet of packages labeled, shrink-wrapped, and ready to go.

"Because I'm using mobile warehouse applications, the production hits the end of the production line and barcode labels are printed on everything. We've got license plates on all our pallets. I've got license plates on all my bin locations, so there's no more hand-keying," explains Kutz.

And no more hand-wringing, either, because Oracle helped every step of the way. The first step: figuring out what the company needed and how it could best solve its IT and process problems. The second step: using Oracle Business Accelerators, business implementation tools that help decrease cost and risk with built-in integration and best practices. This involved filling out a questionnaire designed to get at the heart of the enterprise. "Our financials, our tax structure—basically, it was close to 300 questions," says Kutz. "We answered all the questions, and that took a little input from just about everybody in our company about how we wanted to do business."

This is something that a smaller software vendor, one that didn't have the advantage of years of experience and thousands of prior implementations, wouldn't be able to offer. Life Data Labs would have needed to figure out all the particulars on its own. This was a huge differentiator, says Kutz.

"Having such a large organization to deal with gave me the ability to go to my rep and say, 'This is the functionality I'm dealing with, this is what I want, figure out how to do it,' and they would come back with a technical consultant who would then say, 'This is how you implement that.' I liked it," he says.

Sage also found value in Oracle E-Business Suite. The company, which started its search for a new software infrastructure at the end of 2004, was outgrowing its legacy applications and needed something more robust—it was experiencing steady growth and wanted to make sure that growth could continue. But ease of use was definitely an issue.