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ManageMent www.us- tech.com


Small Quantity Metal Supplier Handles Growth with Easy Transition to Linux-based ERP Software


By Del Williams


tractors in the Delaware Valley around Philadelphia requiring metal parts, business is good for Metal Stock, a small quantity metal supplier in the area. Most metal vendors and distrib-


W


utors in the region have responded to rising demand by consolidating their service centers and catering mostly to those buying large volumes. As a result, they have left the many who require smaller volumes by the way- side, facing longer delivery times and fewer choices. In contrast, Metal Stock has


kept its faith with the smaller buyer who doesn’t want much but still needs fast, efficient service and a wide selection. Consequently, its business has boomed — so much so, that in 2004 president Ken Bell end-


ith a growing number of man - u facturers, machine shops, tool and die makers, and con-


ed his company’s 10-year relation- ship with a franchiser and set the metal supplier on an independent course from which it has never looked back.


Swelling Sales Volume But by the fall of 2005, both Bell


and his controller, Corinne Wight- man, knew that to handle the compa- ny’s swelling sales volume profitably, they needed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software with more power and capacity to efficiently manage key business functions through one shared information database. So they called in their computer


consultant and president of VS Info Systems, Harry Van Steenacker. “They had been reliably using


Vigilant Solutions for 10 years, but it was no longer big enough for them,” says Van Steenacker. “Their sales


and staff had grown so much they were constantly filling up their ac- counting files, having to purge them, and losing much of their sales histo- ry. That’s when I helped them make the move to Oneir Solutions.” The new integrated ERP soft-


ware had a familiar look and feel, yet provided sales order taking and in- voicing for phone orders and over- the-counter sales, purchase order and inventory management for mate- rial requirements, planning and cus- tomer relationship management, as well as accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger for fi- nancial control. But the Oneir ERP software was


downloaded to Van Steenacker with a customized, reliable yet nimble mod- ern day Linux operating system ready to install on either a Windows or Lin- ux server. This supplies not only a sol- id foundation for applications running on the server, but also makes it rela- tively easy to integrate new software with legacy applications. “Linux is basically communica-


tions software that works beautifully with Windows Terminal Services, which allows Metal Stock to manage Oneir Solutions alongside all of its Windows-based applications very com fortably,” says Steenacker. Metal Stock changed to the new


ERP software over a weekend to keep business interruption to a minimum. Van Steenacker co-coordinated the technical side of the transition while Wightman did the internal prepara- tory balancing and verified the cor- rectness of the converted data after- wards.


Weekend Installation “We shut down on Saturday and


opened up again on Monday morning,” recalls Wightman, a former certified public accountant (CPA) who says she has witnessed many transitions from one accounting system to another in her career. “Everything was working. I was very impressed with the smooth- ness of the transition.” That migration also meant no


more disruptive shutdowns for Wight - man and Metal Stock. “Before I had to remove paid in-


voices and purchase orders from our storage files,” says Wightman. “With our growth, every three months or so I had to shut down in mid-afternoon because the system was full. With Oneir Solutions, I haven’t had to shut down at all.” Nor has there been much of a


time-robbing learning curve for Met- al Stock staff. “It is such an easy system to use


because it’s not complicated,” says Wightman. “I needed no training or adjustment time, which surprised me because as a CPA I have gone through transitions with other com- panies that have been nightmares. I had set aside a lot of hours to train each of our six salesmen on the new system, but I ended up spending about half an hour doing it.”


Easy Transition Wightman credits not only Har-


ry Van Steenacker’s careful planning for the ease of transition but also di- rect help from Oneir Solutions Inc. technical support staff ahead of time.


Philadelphia’s Metal Stock enables higher sales growth with enhanced


integrated ERP software and customer support.


“They went through all our


records with me to see if they were all ready for conversion,” explains Wightman. “We spotted a few things so we fixed them. In previous transi- tions I’ve experienced, financial statements you’ve customized do not make it, so you have to put them all back into the system again. But with Oneir Solutions, everything came over, and I didn’t have to re-cus- tomize anything.” Consultant Van Steenacker


concludes, “You don’t need customer support very often because they have such solid applications, but when you do need it, it’s the best in the world.” For Ken Bell of Metal Stock, the


smooth transition to the Linux-based ERP software means that he can get on quickly with growing the compa- ny. Already one of the biggest small- quantity metal suppliers in North America with more than 2,000 cus- tomers and several thousand items stocked in and sold from its 37,500 square-foot facility, Ken is now thinking expansion. “Oneir Solutions has opened up


our bottom line,” says Ken. “It’s ex- tremely reliable and can do sophisti- cated reporting. The sales analysis reports that Corinne generates from it, for example, show us what per- centage of our sales is coming from which customers, and how that is changing from year to year. So we can make plans for growth based on


some hard facts.” Contact: Oneir Solutions Inc.,


PO Box 112, Queenston, ON, Cana- da L0S 1L0 % 877- 322-3580 or 416- 322-3580 fax: 416-322-0809 E-mail: info@oneirsolutions.com Web: www.oneirsolutions.com r


August, 2015


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