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Challenged by time, among other things: Nexergy, Akron Brass, others find SyteLine 7 key to success for to-order manufacturers. (Frontstep).

Article Excerpt
Discrete, to-order manufacturers face special challenges, in the form of custom products, volatile sourcing, restrictive inventory, constrained capacity, fluctuating demand and complex supplier networks. In addition, all these issues are increasingly cast in the context of a global economy.

Executed properly, a to-order business model allows a manufacturer to meet those challenges, to build highly configured products within a committed timeframe. Customers expect--and receive--speedy delivery of the exact items they want.

Given widely recognized trends toward mass customization, it's become de rigeur for manufacturers to run in to-order mode. But it's not always easy, largely because it requires close and constant communication, coordination, and cooperation among all members of the supply chain.

Further, it's been said that the mid-market manufacturer typically derives 80 percent of its business from one or two key "channel-master" customers. Caught between the power of these large customers and the constraints imposed by its suppliers--and limited by fixed machines, people, IT resources, and budget-achieving "to-order" levels of coordination at the mid-tier can be especially difficult.

That doesn't mean a medium-size, to-order manufacturer has no recourse. It can find saving grace in its own ingenuity--to devise productive inter-departmental, customer-facing, and supplier-facing business processes.

Today, all business processes, virtually without exception, are supported by and dependent upon business software applications.

"One of the main reasons we're moving to a state-of-the-art enterprise suite," says Bill Foard, information systems manager for Columbus, Ohio-based Nexergy, a maker of battery packs and chargers for portable electronic goods, "is that it gives us the opportunity to reassess our business processes and see if there are ways to improve them."

Given the aforementioned budget and resource constraints, however, a medium-size, to-order maker of goods doesn't have the luxury of indulging in so-called "best-of-breed" integration adventures. More likely, it will look to meet business application needs through proven technologies, pre-integrated suites, and a single point of accountability.

Like Nexergy, Wooster, Ohio-based Akron Brass Co., a manufacturer of nozzles, valves, and other equipment used on fire-fighting hoses and trucks, found a flexible, integrated solution in the SyteLine 7 enterprise software suite from Frontstep, Columbus, Ohio.

"We constantly strive to compress the time it takes to convert an idea into an actual product in our customers' hands," says Tom Magner, director of information systems at Akron Brass. "We want to achieve speed by doing things more efficiently, eliminating all the steps that cause people to duplicate effort. SyteLine 7 helps us do that."

Frontstep partnered with companies like Nexergy and Akron Brass when it developed...

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