Kirby Miner, CIO,
Trex Company
Decked Out for the Future
JD EDWARDS UPGRADE KEEPS TREX ON SOLID COMPETITIVE GROUND.
rex Company has built an empire on grocery bags. The
company turns plastic, wood scraps, and sawdust into
wood-alternative decking, using 1. 5 billion recycled grocery
bags to make Trex products each year. In fact, the average
500-square-foot composite Trex deck contains about 140,000
recycled plastic bags.
Although Trex certainly pioneered the use of 98 percent
recyclable materials to create its signature deck flooring, several
competitors have sprung up in the 15 years since the company
was founded. Indeed, Trex executives realized that aging technology and unwieldy manual processes left over from the company’s early days could seriously hinder the company’s ability to
quickly and reliably deliver orders to wholesale distributors and
retail centers.
So when Kirby Miner came aboard as CIO, one of his first
missions was not only to replace the company’s aging enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with Oracle’s JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne 8. 12 but also to use the upgrade as an opportunity to improve efficiency and productivity to stay competitive.
“We had been growing so fast that it was like running
with our hair on fire for the past seven years,” says Miner.
“We were trying to keep up with demand, branding, and a
product list that grew to include railings, trim, and fencing.
As a result, our IT became a tertiary type of event and our
systems grew stagnant.”
Working with Oracle Partner CSS, Trex pursued a plan to
streamline operations by simplifying sales and inventory processes and creating a more transparent financials process. At the
same time, the company wanted to slash IT costs by moving
an externally hosted ERP system into the Trex data center.
Concentrating on the priorities set by executive management,
Trex and CSS used creative, cost-effective project methods and
subject matter experts to make the plan a success. As a result,
Trex realized numerous business process improvements that
today enable management to concentrate on the things that are
important to the company’s success—providing the best products for environmentally friendly outdoor living.
“Our project was complex and involved various business
