Fastest-growing private business upgrades systems
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/1/2004 12:00:00 AM
This past summer found propane-powered mosquito traps in backyards across America. They aren't cheap—but enough consumers think they're worthwhile that sales have soared at American Biophysics Corp., a North Kingstown, R.I.-based manufacturer of the Mosquito Magnet. It's said that strong sales of the traps have turned American Biophysics into America's fastest-growing private business, with a growth rate of more than 25,000 percent over a five-year period.
With its enterprise systems creaking under the strain of all that growth, last fall American Biophysics decided to move to Oracle's 11i, with a targeted go-live date of February 2004, explains Stacy Lanphere, the company's director of IT. But as the go-live date approached, American Biophysics realized its fragmented, low-end shipping systems would struggle to cope.
"Oracle is very functional, but lacks what's needed for a true shipping system," says Lanphere. Committed to the Oracle 11i go-live date, American Biophysics needed an Oracle-compatible shipping system, and fast.
The requirement, explains Order Fulfillment Manager Mark Bates, was for a system that could deal with the business rules that underpinned American Biophysics' shipping dock.
"We needed something that could cope with the different needs of both carriers and customers—such as their requirements in terms of labeling formats, bills of lading, and compliance rules," he says. The system also needed to be flexible enough to deal with vastly differing order sizes—for example, truckloads of shipments to Home Depot, pallets to smaller customers, and individual packages in the case of spare parts.
"For ease of integration, we looked at any vendor that had an Oracle partnership," explains Lanphere. The range of choices wasn't huge, and American Biophysics quickly settled on two linked offerings from Kewill Systems: Kewill Compliance Partner, and the Javalin multicarrier enterprise shipping solution.
Within 30 days, a team from Kewill had, as an interim solution, implemented Kewill's midsize company shipping system, Clippership, so that shipping wouldn't miss a beat. Meanwhile, another project team was getting the full enterprise solution under way. Its mission, explains Kewill Project Engineer Jeff Flanagan, was to specify the system, install it, test it, and go live before the end of April. "We did it," he says with a grin.
Days later, shipments began spiraling up to a peak rate of 350,000 a month. "It was all amazingly smooth—I'm just not aware of any issues at all," reports Lanphere.
