Moline Bearing opts for open-source ERP—on a Mac
by Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/1/2005 12:00:00 AM MDT
Moline Bearing is a tiny St. Charles, Ill.-based manufacturer of roller and spherical bearings. With six employees, but a global customer base, company President David Fauntleroy has to do a lot with just a few people. By last year, an old inventory management and accounting software system just wasn't able to keep up, but a big-name ERP system was out of Moline Bearing's league, and its budget.
"We wanted to get as close as possible to what the big guys use without having to spend a fortune in the process," Fauntleroy says.
He also had one other requirement: the new system had to run on an Apple Macintosh.
"I had a PC back in the mid- '80's and I hated it," he explains. "I bought my first Mac in 1988, and when we bought the company in 1992, I had to find something that worked on a Mac because I wouldn't use anything else. I am the IT department here, and with a Mac, you just don't have a lot of the same issues as you do with a Windows system."
Fauntleroy examined nearly 20 business software packages before he found OpenMFG from small to midsize enterprise systems supplier OpenMFG.The ERP software looks and feels the same whether it is running on a Mac, Windows, or Linux platform. The database, PostgreSQL, is an open-source product.
OpenMFG is a hybrid between true open-source and proprietary software. "What we've done is appropriate the open-source development methodology and applied it within the context of our private ERP community," explains OpenMFG President Ned Lilly. "The software is not free, but all our customers get the source code, and they are encouraged to make enhancements and share them with everybody else."
With the help of EzBizPartner, a small-business consultancy and OpenMFG value-added reseller, Moline Bearing implemented the solution in about six months. Real-time available-to-promise capability is critical for Fauntleroy, so he and EzBizPartner developed a window that shows inventory of both purchased and manufactured goods in real time at the point of sales-order entry.
"We're a just-in-time manufacturer," Fauntleroy explains. "Our business is driven by customers that do not keep back-up inventory of our products."
Getting all of Moline Bearing's data into OpenMFG was a challenge. The information was in an unsupported, highly customized database, and several passes were required to get the information into OpenMFG. "The file maps weren't necessarily apples-to-apples, and we had to dump [data] from the old system into spreadsheets and then into something else before we could get it into the new system," says Fauntleroy.
OpenMGFG has given Fauntleroy the crucial visibility he needs to operate.
"It's been terrific for us," he says. "I'd never had any kind of true ERP before. I have a lot of components that fit into five or six different assemblies, and I had no way of knowing how many components to order. Now I can look at how many a month I'm using and reset the order. That's a huge time-saver. Seeing everything that is happening in the business leads to better control because you know what to order, when to order, and what to produce."
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