In-house manufacturing raises margins; exposes "missing IT"

Fighting razor-thin margins from import competitors, sports apparel maker and distributor Gympro recently brought some outsourced manufacturing processes back into its Los Angeles-area plant, including screenprinting, sewing, heat transfer, and other operations to gain back the value-add dollars.

But when Internet orders spiked up, popularity overwhelmed the company's ability to respond.

Order management was a particular problem for Gympro. Internet orders generated a significant amount of complexity because without back-office integration, the orders were manually reentered into different systems at manufacturing and shipping stages.

"We had to revamp our procedures from sales right through to shipping," says Tony Cimolino, VP of Gympro. "I wanted to know how I could get the added productivity that you read about in The Wall Street Journal every day."

Gympro wasn't alone. "Manufacturers that are doing well are moving up the value chain," says Richard Forsythe, director of accounting product marketing for Best Software . "They're outsourcing basic manufacturing to China or wherever and keeping the value-add processes here in the U.S."

According to Forsythe, small and midsize manufacturers have the same enterprise management needs as their big brothers in the Fortune 500.

Gympro upgraded its Best MAS 90 enterprise control application with e-commerce and customer relationship management functions.

Cimolino says implementation results have exceeded expectations. "It used to take eight to nine minutes to process an Internet order and seven days to fill it. Now it takes less than a minute to process it and we are usually filling it that same day."