Cool
Customer
TECUMSEH PRODUCTS COMPANY
UNIFIES GLOBAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
AND FORECASTING WHILE RETAINING
REGIONAL STRENGTHS.
Doug Yenor, former CIO and current IT advisor, Tecumseh
ecumseh Products Company of Ann Arbor, Michigan,
Tecumseh’s compressors are sold in more than 120
countries on five continents, and the company has
manufacturing operations in seven countries. Until
recently, this sprawling business ran like a handful of
independent operations, without centralized data, con-
trols, planning, or processes. As a result, people in one
part of Tecumseh sometimes competed with colleagues
from another region. Intracompany purchasing wasn’t
well coordinated, and global financial reports were
tedious to prepare.
To address these challenges, leaders at Tecumseh
moved the entire company to a single global Oracle
enterprise resource planning (ERP) system starting in
2004, and then added Oracle’s Demantra applications in
2009. The results include globally consolidated financial
and supply chain data, improved demand forecasting,
and generally more-efficient end-to-end operations.
“There aren’t many systems outside of Oracle that
we need to process and complete an order,” says Doug
