Cloud-Rider Designs, Ltd.

Cloud-Rider Designs Ltd. is a leading Canadian designer, manufacturer, and worldwide distributor of high-quality aftermarket accessories for trucks, vans, sport utility vehicles and cars. The company's mission statement explicitly highlights its desire to demonstrate Biblical principles for life and business, and to provide a healthy and prosperous workplace for employees.

As demand for its products has increased in recent years, the company's slow and tedious manual operating processes were not keeping pace. This started to impact that workplace in a real way, and with it, employee productivity and ultimately product delivery. Each of the nearly 100 work orders processed each day took around 3-5 minutes to process. Reorder reports had to be run daily, and purchase orders and work orders entered manually. Moreover, the company's ERP system was unstable and unable to grow along with the companys expansion. Inventory flow was impossible to understand, says Amanda Devers, production manager at Cloud-Rider. We had to create two different databases, one for sales and one for production, resulting in a lot of paperwork and data entry.

Management identified the key problems and began to seek a solution. Over the next two-and-a-half years, Devers and two other employees conducted research on possible solutions and vendors, all the while carrying on with their daily work routines. After a series of meetings, conference calls, product demonstrations, and exhaustive reference checking, the Cloud-Rider team chose xTuple from a list of eight vendors.

xTuple provided further benefits:

• Straightforward and simply implementation process
• Ability to work with multiple forms of currency
• Keep component stock at necessary levels to meet customer demand with little or no human intervention
• Software can operate on any platform (Windows, Linux or Mac)
• Easy of system administration
• Dramatically reduces the time to update each workstation
• Price changes in less than one hour
• Improved database stability eliminates production hold-ups
• Work orders take three seconds instead of three minutes
• Price changes take less than an hour, not weeks

And xTuple ships with hundreds of reports out of the box; minor customizations can be applied with little effort with the simple, intuitive OpenRPT report writer which is integrated with the xTuple ERP Suite. (OpenRPT is an open source project in its own right, maintained by xTuple).

With all these achievements, feedback from Cloud-Rider employees has been very positive. Looking to the future, Cloud-Rider is investigating a wireless barcode scanner running xTuple (a product developed by Yellow Dog Consulting). The xTuple Wireless client is available today, and runs on any number of handheld devices.

"xTuple was definitely the right choice for us," Devers concludes. "We haven't even used it to its full potential yet."