Channel Products green-lights IFS enterprise apps across all subsidiaries
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/29/2007 11:59:00 AM
Channel Products Inc., a Chesterland, Ohio-based manufacturer of ignition controls for gas appliances, has gone live on IFS Applications 7.
According to CEO Dave Wozencraft, the company and other subsidiaries of its Santa Barbara-based parent, Channel Technologies Inc., will benefit from more timely financial and management reporting and increased flexibility, allowing process improvements that will help the family of companies better serve its customers. Channel Technologies also will implement IFS Applications at its headquarters and other subsidiaries.
"Our IFS Applications implementation went more smoothly than I expected," Channel Products President Dave Wozencraft said. "Our internal implementation team, managers from Channel Technologies and IFS worked seamlessly with our consultant, Norma Davis of Connective Edge Resources, who did an excellent job to ensure a smooth transition. We knew going in that this was more than an IT project, but rather an organization-wide initiative that required involvement of multiple business disciplines to succeed."
"It is very unusual to have such a smooth cutover to a new system, and this speaks to the strength and dedication of the implementation teams," Davis said. "Channel Technologies and Channel Products teams were able to work effectively as one team across organizational and departmental boundaries."
"Standardizing on IFS Applications is a very sound strategy for uniting divisions or subsidiaries into a unified company," IFS North America President and CEO Cindy Jaudon said. "Channel Technologies and its subsidiaries represent a diverse range of business models ranging from make-to-stock to engineer-to-order, and serve both government and commercial customers. IFS is uniquely suited to meet the diverse needs of such a broad family of companies."
Industrial manufacturing is one of IFS' targeted vertical markets. IFS has a broad customer base in the industry, focusing on medium- to large-size manufacturers that need support for complex order-driven and mixed-mode manufacturing across the extended enterprise. With strong support for project management, engineering, constraint-based scheduling, product configuration, and after-sales support, IFS' business solution is designed to help companies improve quality, contain costs, and improve their competitive position in manufacturing industry segments such as machinery, defense, fabricated metal products, and plastic products. Industrial manufacturing companies also benefit from IFS' lifecycle management solution, which goes beyond product lifecycle management (PLM) to provide better integration and management of three critical business areas-products, customers, and resources-throughout their life cycles.
