“We had a great product, but we needed to make the manufacturing and
distribution processes more efficient to become more competitive.”
—Kirby Miner, CIO, Trex Company
units—this was much more than just an upgrade. Finishing
on time and under budget is a credit to the leadership we got
from CSS and the support we got from our senior management
team,” says Miner.
CLEARING THE DECKS
Trex had reached a point where its leaders knew they had to
gain efficiencies to continue the company’s growth.
“We had a great product, but we needed to make the manufacturing and distribution processes more efficient to become
more competitive,” says Miner, who found multiple areas ripe
for improvement within IT.
For example, the company’s accounting processes, while
accurate, posed one challenge. The financial chart of accounts
was difficult to navigate and inefficient. “With many companies such as Trex, as the business changes, they start adding
more general ledger account numbers rather than restructuring the chart of accounts,” says Keith Jones, director at
Charleston, South Carolina–based CSS. “So more often than
not, the account numbers don’t adhere to a set of standards that
ties them to particular parts of the business, meaning that it
becomes difficult to access information for reports.”
Waiting for end-of-month accounting reports was not sufficient. “We’re not a 35-person staff anymore,” says Miner. “We
wanted more-detailed, faster, and customizable reporting.” For
example, the company wanted to be able to access and analyze
more-detailed information on purchasing variances, and it
wanted to give users the ability to produce customized reports
on the fly.
As with the chart of accounts, Trex needed to improve and
automate outdated business processes to support company
growth. “We can no longer get by with manual processes,” says
Miner. “We wanted to use technology to streamline the supply
chain process.”
The prime target was the distribution process. Trex uses a
multitier distribution system, with about 80 percent of sales
going to traditional building distributors and the remaining 20
percent heading to big-box retailers such as Home Depot and
Lowe’s. But although those bigger companies used electronic
data interchange (EDI) to share data online in a structured
Five Steps to Getting the Most from a System Upgrade
Sometimes an upgrade is just that: installing the latest version of a
particular business application. But
sometimes companies can ratchet up
the ROI by reaping additional business value from the process. Keith
Jones, director for Oracle Partner
CSS, based in Charleston, South
Carolina, suggests the following five
tactics to optimize the return on any
technology upgrade.
1. Upgrade within a strategic business plan. Look at the upgrade in the
context of what you want to accomplish from a business point of view.
Are there business processes that can
be streamlined or automated? How
can the technology solve those problems? “There are real opportunities
to decrease inventory, manufacturing, and administrative costs with an
ERP [enterprise resource planning]
upgrade, and identifying those oppor-
tunities will help you build a stronger
business case for the project,” says
Jones. In fact, companies such as
CSS offer an automated assess-
ment tool designed to identify the
costs and hard dollar returns from
an upgrade of Oracle’s JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne.
2. Implement with an eye to the
future. Make sure the project will
support future business growth, and
build those requirements in to the
implementation. “You want to make
sure that periodic assessments and
upgrades are part of a five-year busi-
ness plan,” says Jones.
3. Look for smaller opportunities to
add business value. Upgrades don’t
have to be large—sometimes adding
a smaller “edge application” can yield
surprisingly large returns.
4. Manage culture change. Yes, this is
project management 101, but one of
the best ways to maximize ROI with an
ERP upgrade is to make sure the users
are on board. Managing expectations
and involving business units in process
redesigns can go a long way toward
getting that crucial buy-in.
5. Go vanilla. Avoid software customi-
zation as much as possible—it saves
time and money and creates flexibil-
ity by removing the need to recode
customizations with each upgrade.
“Every company wants to believe
that it has unique processes, but the
reality is that most companies are
pretty standard,” says Jones. “You
are paying for each software vendor’s
expertise and the best practices that
vendor has put into its system, and it
often pays to leverage that by using
its processes.”
