Morbark, Inc. Upgrades to Enhance Supplier Collaboration, Extend Supply Chain Automation, and Integrate CRM Processes
 
 

Morbark, Inc. Upgrades to Enhance Supplier Collaboration, Extend Supply Chain Automation, and Integrate CRM Processes

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Morbark, Inc. manufactures high-performance heavy equipment used in the recycling, construction, sawmill, biomass energy, and forestry industries. The company’s products include tub grinders, wood hogs, drum chippers, brush chippers, shredders, debarkers, peelers, and conveyors.

Morbark wanted to ensure its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system kept pace with market changes, such as increased price sensitivity, that impact the company’s made-to-order forestry and recycling equipment business. For example, the company wanted to work more effectively and efficiently with its more than 20 major suppliers to ensure orders were completed on time and within budget.

To continue to build a foundation for a one-stop shop for all business data, Morbark upgraded to Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0. With the implementation, Morbark provided its largest suppliers with the ability to view and acknowledge orders via a portal, as opposed to the time consuming and disparate process of sending e-mails or calling Morbark’s purchasing department. The data coming from vendors is also more consistent and timely.

 

A word from Morbark, Inc.

  • “Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne continues to be the central component to our supply chain and manufacturing management environment. The upgrade to version 9.0 enables us to interact more efficiently with our vendors by automating many processes, including order acknowledgement. This frees our purchasers to focus on other strategic tasks. As important, we have more consistent, accurate, and timely data from our suppliers and can work more effectively with them to ensure that orders are ready on time.” – Terry Reihl, Vice President, Information Technology, Morbark, Inc.

Morbark now has greater visibility into its inventory and supply chain. For example, it can more carefully plan and manage the production of long lead-time orders that can take 30 to 45 days to build because it has greater visibility into inventory requirements as well as supplier commitments. The company is also working to move the management of its service and warranty processes to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne.

In addition to its JD Edwards EnterpriseOne upgrade, Morbark recently migrated its customer relationship management to Oracle CRM On Demand. It also converted to Oracle Application Server. With the migration, Morbark made its environment more stable, enabled automatic kernel recreation in the event of a crash, and ensured the ability to perform load balancing on Java virtual machines.

 
 

 
 

Oracle Product and Services

Why Oracle

Morbark has been using Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne modules since 1999 with positive results. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne is well suited to the company’s build-to-order environment, with the highly configurable suite delivering more than 80% of the functionality Morbark needs, right out of the box. The company upgraded to 9.0 for several reasons, including its commitment to staying current on support and up to date with its applications and hardware. In addition, Morbark also wanted to take advantage of expanded functionality, particularly the ability to effectively track customer data.

Partner

Morbark worked with Terillium, Inc. to help to support the upgrade to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0. Morbark had teamed with Terillium on a previous upgrade in 2005 and returned to the company because of its extensive knowledge of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne modules, as well as its understanding of Morbark’s business and IT environment.