Meeting all of one's business needs with a single application can be an extremely difficult task, especially when that business blends elements from different markets.
Finding and standardizing on an enterprise application is difficult enough for a complex manufacturer or a construction company. But when a single business includes elements of both manufacturing and construction contracting, meeting all business needs with a single application becomes very difficult.
Just ask Todd Sorg, IT director for Fabcon, a Savage, Minn.-based precast concrete company. After a challenging selection process, Fabcon implemented and went live on IFS Applications in January of 2007, and has gained unprecedented real-time visibility of what is happening on both sides of their company.
“Fabcon is a bit unique in that we are both a manufacturer and a construction company,” Sorg said. “The previous tool set we had been using was really geared towards the construction side, and was really was ignoring the manufacturing side of our business. Moreover, it was woefully outdated.”
Getting outside help
So challenging was the task of finding an enterprise application that met all of Fabcon’s needs that they looked for outside help to identify a vendor.
“We actually brought in a third-party vendor to help us with the selection process,” Sorg said. “In this case, it was (accounting and consulting firm) Baker Tilly. They came in and went through a process with us to help us figure out what we were – whether we were a construction company or a manufacturer. And in the end, we eventually decided we were really a hybrid and there was no way for us to select a package that was for one or the other and be happy with what we got.”
Before long, Fabcon’s selection team, with the help of Virchow Krause, identified three software packages to seriously consider: SAP, Peoplesoft/JD Edwards and IFS. SAP was weeded out first due to the amount of business process engineering involved in implementation.
“One of the things we found to be the biggest difficulty with SAP was that it was a completely wide open system, and you can do whatever you want with it,” Sorg said. “We didn’t think our processes were at a point where we could take a wide open system and make it work. We needed something with some rules in place so we could fall in line with those proscribed processes. We just didn’t feel like it had any rules in place and we would have to define every single rule for everything we wanted to do. It didn’t have a real good flow in place as we started the process.”
At the time of Fabcon’s selection, IFS had yet to embark on its AURORA project, designed to deliver a new level of intuitive usability, but ease of use still was the determining factor in the selection of IFS Applications.
“When we compared JD Edwards and IFS Applications, it really came down to usability,” Sorg said. “When we got down to that point, we felt either one of them could have worked just fine, but usability, the user interface and comfort really seemed to win out for the selection committee. And then there was also the whole enigma of what would happen with the JD Edwards product as it was acquired by Oracle.”
Successful implementation despite detours
Fabcon’s implementation went smoothly despite midstream changes to the product scope, including the addition of a third-party estimating system. Sorg credits continuing involvement by Virchow-Krause, and Fabcon’s ISO 9000 certification, with ensuring a successful go-live.
“When we got to implementation, we knew we were understaffed and incapable of handling the implementation on our own, so we retained Virchow Krause to help us with the implementation because we were very happy with their work on the selection process,” Sorg said. “As a company, Fabcon is ISO certified, and that set us up to be more successful in the implementation processes because we did have some processes in place and knew what we did and how we did it.”
Well-documented processes are of particular importance for a complex engineer-to-order company like Fabcon, according to Sorg.
“We have a semi-complex process when we list a project all the way to completion, starting with handing off a project from the sales process into the project management process and into accounting and closing off projects,” Sorg said. “Without the ISO 9000 and all of the documentation that supports that, we would have had a harder time figuring out how we wanted the system to work and flow. My opinion is that the implementation was incredibly streamlined by our ISO documentation.
Fabcon started its implementation the second week of January of 2006 and spent the first month on an overview of IFS Applications. A subsequent step involved overlaying Fabcon’s ISO documentation with process maps from IFS Applications.
Life after go-live
Since go-live, Fabcon’s management has enjoyed an unprecedented degree of visibility of productivity, cost, progress against project timelines, and other dynamics from the front office all the way through to the field.
“Prior to go-live, we had gone through the process of determining what our key metrics would be,” Sorg said. “We are looking at things like productivity in the plant compared to bid -- how we were doing compared to what we bid. The whole upper management team felt we had so much more visibility of the operation from design to estimating to actual production to installation. It made us much more effective once we had fully converted to IFS.”
Another benefit of implementing IFS has been improved flow of information between manufacturing and construction sides of the business.
“Information does flow better between the two sides of the business, but we do treat them as almost two separate entities,” Sorg said. “One side follows a project all the way up to having the product shipped, and then the field picks it up and goes from there. From a visibility standpoint, the management team can see it flow through the system much better than we could before.”
Many enterprise applications for project-intensive businesses are like newspapers … they tell you what happened, but only after it is much too late to do anything about it. Sorg stresses that Fabcon’s instance of IFS Applications allows them to respond to project variances, changing input prices and other variables in time to keep a project on budget.
“By far the biggest win was the sheer access to data, and how the visibility of our projects changed from a rear view, where we would see it in about a month, to something that was happening in a real-time basis,” Sorg said. “When we get data back from the field, we can see any change that has taken place, or if in the manufacturing process we are trending up we can get to the root of the matter much more quickly than we did before. We are using what the field is reporting to us on a daily basis.”
If anything, Fabcon was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data at their disposal, which made it difficult to decide what reports to generate. For a time, the company tried using Crystal Reports to pull data from IFS Applications.
“Then IFS told us about Clickbase,” Sorg said, referring to the Jacksonville, Fla.-based analytics software partner. “They have provided us with more functionality and offers more flexibility in how we report information.”
Wireless in the field
Fabcon’s internal staff has developed its own simplified work reporting software – deployed on laptops in the field – to allow construction activity to be reported for real-time visibility to the front office.
“We actually have an internally developed program that gives an easy interface for time reporting in the field. Right now, we are using laptops with aircards. We had originally tried handhelds, but found they were cumbersome for entering data while laptops made data entry much easier. We have between 50 to 100 workers in the field using this system at a given time, depending on the time of year and the weather,” Sorg said. “We designed it to go directly into IFS, and it tracks field time, attendance and productivity on a daily basis. Our workers can either upload things in real time or at a later date, auto-populating the Oracle database.”
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