For not-for-profit Bedford Industries in Adelaide, Australia, avoiding that frustration was a key goal in its recent overhaul of business systems managing five different business divisions.
South Australia's largest provider of employment, training and accommodation for people with disabilities, Bedford employs 170 able-bodied staff who coordinate employment for nearly 800 people with disabilities.
Its operations are split into four key divisions: Bedford Furniture, which manufactures flat-panel, melamine furniture; Bedford Packaging Services, which packs products such as Qantas cutlery packs and Kimberley Clarke samples as well as handling large shrink-wrapping, band sealing and other packaging; and Adelaide Property & Gardens, which provides a variety of horticultural services ranging from lawnmowing to litter collection.
Bedford's Balyana Residential Center provides life skills and accommodation for 84 people with disabilities, while the adjoining Balyana Center also provides conference and catering services to the general public.
In addition to these business units, Bedford also maintains the normal range of administrative functions to coordinate its large and busy labor contracting operations, and telemarketing and fund-raising divisions that support its various operational arms.
This structure made consolidated information management a significant business challenge that just wasn't being met by the company's previous systems, says Jill Ribbons, project manager with Bedford Industries.
"Our business is diversified, with high volume and quick turnaround, which made it a challenge to find a solution that would meet our needs," she says. "Our previous legacy system had reached its use-by date. It provided inadequate management information, and had become unmanageable and unsupportable by the vendor. We had a plethora of spreadsheets across the organization, because people couldn't get the management information they needed."
Business growth was putting pressure on existing manual systems used to consolidate data for activities such as quoting and estimating, planning and scheduling, production, purchasing, financials, management reporting, and customer relationship management.
The desire to improve these core activities led Bedford to begin an extensive needs assessment and product evaluation process.
Repeated meetings with user groups encouraged brainstorming of functional requirements and production of formal data flow diagrams, eventually resulting in the creation of a high-level picture of the company's operations and the movement of data within it.
With the disparity of the business operations revealed, it became clear that Bedford's new environment needed the full range of financial management capabilities - general ledger, accounts payable and receivable, and so on - integrated with the materials and product management capabilities of a full manufacturing resource planning (MRP) solution. Acknowledging its small to middling size, Bedford began a careful evaluation of tier-three enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
After several rounds of demonstrations, vendor scoring, callbacks and shortlists, Bedford chose Epicor Vantage as the basis for its new information environment. It wasn't a decision made lightly: the whole process took nearly a year.
Forget the past
To head off potential cultural clashes down the track, Ribbons was careful to involve users from right across the business during the system design phase.
It's always helpful to get users closely involved, she aid, adding "I'm very keen on that approach."
That approach, as it turned out, involved a considerable amount of navel-gazing as the project managers worked with individual divisions to critically review and restructure their operations.
Recognizing the extensive credentials of the Epicor system, the implementation team worked with Vantage distributor Cogita and division to adapt their processes to the models encapsulated within the system. This was a more difficult, but ultimately more promising, approach than trying to customize the software to the company's own requirements - a hazardous road that Bedford already knew far too well.
"We made the decision up front that we would not follow the route taken with our legacy system," Ribbons says. "With that system, we would put in enhancement request after enhancement request to make the system fit us. But what we've bought with Epicor is based on best practice, which really meant we should look at the way we were doing things."
That introspection resulted in some interesting findings - most importantly, perhaps, that the company's existing data store was far less accurate than would be hoped. This had already been known implicitly by staff that had, for years, relied on personally-developed Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to conduct the analysis they needed; their numbers might seem to work, but often didn't match those of other workers when compared.
Rather than getting caught up in a major data cleansing exercise, Ribbons' team made the decision to bypass its legacy almost completely.
Instead, conversations with business leaders identified the most crucial parts of the company's sales history, supplier files and customer files; this information was manually keyed into the newly implemented Epicor system.
"Data integrity was a bit of an issue with our old legacy systems," she explains. "By taking that approach, we had a clean slate to start with."
In data they trust
Bedford flipped the switch on its new Epicor system on June 1 last year, giving it a month to iron out wrinkles in the new system before the beginning of the new financial year.
While many companies would run new and old systems in parallel to ensure a smooth transition, Bedford management made the decision to go live across the entire company at once - following a 'big boom' strategy that saw all of the company's users go live on the Vantage system on the same day.
Despite the extent of change, that transition went quite smoothly, Ribbons says, which she credits to the time spent by the implementation team on issues such as clarifying business needs from the system, clear documentation, user training and user involvement. "We were fairly prepared when we went live on day one," she recalls.
A month after implementation, the company's meticulous migration planning paid off when financial managers were able to use the data ported from the old system to produce accurate, end-of-financial-year reports - even though Vantage hadn't been running the system for fully 11 months of that year.
Since then, users have come to embrace the accuracy and capabilities of the new system.
A range of reports - based on clean and consistent data - are readily available to support all facets of Bedford Industries' operations. "In most cases they've been able to throw their spreadsheets away," Ribbons says.
More timely reporting supports more timely decision-making, ultimately promising to significantly improve the efficiency and flexibility of the company's operations. Bedford is looking for a five-year ROI for the system, with most of the savings coming from the company's leaner and more accurate operations.
"We've certainly seen some savings in the amount of time it takes to get information out," Ribbons says. "There are definitely time savings in being able to produce timely monthly board reports, and I think we'll start to experience more as users get more comfortable with the product."
Beyond a doubt
One area where there has been some user resistance is procurement, which has been converted from a ponderous, "nightmare" manual ordering system into a fully electronic procurement system. Linked in with the rest of the information in Vantage, the system has been able to automate processes such as purchase order generation based on current manufacturing consumption, and forecasting based on current outputs.
Ribbons concedes that getting all the company's users to embrace the new system has been "a challenge", but believes most have moved past their initial hesitance to move into an all-online workflow. More than 10,000 online Vantage help pages, bolstered with extensive, Bedford-created business documentation, provide an invaluable resource to help employees work through unexpected problems.
By guiding users through the new system and the company's new processes, the implementation team was able to direct the project with a gentle but firm hand. This philosophy has included efforts to stop users blaming the system when something goes wrong; with a complete audit trail now available for each transaction recorded in the Vantage system, investigations into data discrepancies usually point the finger elsewhere.
"The Vantage system provides an excellent audit trail of all the transactions we conduct, and that's something we didn't have with the old system," Ribbons says. "If users came to us with a query, it was almost impossible to prove what had actually happened. With the new system, we can trace it right back - and in probably 98 percent of the issues that have been raised with us, they're not system-related issues but something the user has done."
Belief in the output of the new system reflects the extent of the change that the Epicor implementation has wrought at Bedford Industries. With its uniform database and ERP system now well and truly established, the process improvements that Ribbons' team has wrought are continuing to deliver new benefits as users find new ways to exploit the system's capabilities.
Summary
Company: Bedford Industries
Industry: Manufacturing, service provision
Size: 150/170 employees managing 600/800 people with disabilities
Challenge: Aging information system couldn't integrate four different business divisions, forcing employees to build proprietary and often inaccurate data models.