Creamer Metal Products

Creamer Metal Products, Inc. is a manufacturer and distributor of material handling equipment for the grain industry in the agricultural community, as well as a contract manufacturer to other commercial industries. Formed in 1946 by Kermit and Donna Creamer, it sells both domestically and internationally to dealers who sell directly to the end user, or to the installer or millwright. Its extensive product line includes bucket elevators, grain distributors, cleaners, screw and drag conveyors, and all associated accessories necessary for a complete installation.

Wes Jacobs is General Manager for Creamer, and is responsible for managing the company’s financial systems. He has more than 25 years of experience with ERP systems, and held IT director roles prior to moving into top management.

The Situation

Near the end of 2006, Creamer Metal Products faced a number of new challenges associated with helping its customers capitalize on an emerging opportunity – ethanol production. From farms to processing plants, people across the agricultural industry were quickly retooling to gain from government initiatives promoting the biofuel, and as a result, Creamer’s dealers were clamoring for the parts that made it possible and Creamer was struggling to keep up with the demand.

Creamer, a family owned business, had been faithfully serving satisfied customers for over 60 years, and its business processes were both mature and effective. For decades, organizational experience was the source of knowledge for inventory decisions, and buying patterns were relatively predictable given Cramer’s long-guarded intimacy with its partners and clients.

But with the rise in demand for products to support ethanol production, suddenly the game had changed. While the sudden spike seemed a very good thing, in the short-term, the incumbent paper-dominated business processes were not efficient enough to handle it. Creamer needed to move quickly to correct the issue, or it would miss out on key revenue opportunities.

With this in mind, Creamer for the first time welcomed in management from outside the family, and hired Wes Jacobs. He brought with him over two decades of experience working with large manufacturers, and was tapped in order to help tackle the problems using his knowledge of technology and manufacturing industry best practices.

In Jacobs’ view, Creamer needed to evolve more quickly than it could ever have anticipated. After decades of slow, steady growth acting as a “Mom and Pop shop,” it had suddenly sprouted into an international business with a complex inventory of products. It needed inventory and financial systems to match this progression, rather than continuing to try to manage the enterprise using Quick Books Pro and a custom order entry system. This would prove vital for not only the short-term ethanol opportunity, but in order to create a more efficient operation in advance of the economic downturn that didn’t show its teeth until more recently.

Regardless, Jacobs set out to find a system for managing its business that included enterprise-level manufacturing functionality. To continue to grow its market while maintaining the high levels of service its longstanding dealers and customers expected, it needed technology that enabled it to scale upward.

The Search

Given Jacobs’ experience working with ERP products, he was relatively confident about the requirements for a system for Creamer. In terms of the technology itself, scalability was top of mind, but also important was assuring the product chosen had advanced functionality specific to manufacturers’ needs. So Jacobs started with proprietary offerings like SAP and Made 2 Manage.

“What set xTuple apart from the start was how solid the functionality was for the price,” said Jacobs. “Most small to mid-sized companies cannot afford the more expensive ERP systems out there, but they do need a system. xTuple’s offering was clearly the best value.”

But the quality of the product during the scoping phase wasn’t the only reason xTuple stood out. Jacobs’ experience with ERP vendors had taught him that an ERP package is only as good as its flexibility and the strength of its next revision. He wanted to implement a system that would be continually improved as Creamer’s business matured. In talking with xTuple’s CEO, Ned Lilly, he learned quickly that this was a shared value.

“Ned has created an unusually open approach to customers and provides a great deal of information about the products that xTuple offers,” noted Jacobs. “He also listens to customers and acts on the conversations – customer ideas turn into product functionality quickly.”

The Solution: xTuple ERP Manufacturing Edition

Creamer chose xTuple ERP Manufacturing Edition, an award winning, fully integrated, end-to-end software system for manufacturers. With separate modules for managing each dimension of a manufacturing business, from the shop floor through to accounting, Jacobs knew he had chosen a sufficiently powerful tool, but had concerns about earning adoption among users. What he might not have anticipated was the speed at which his company would accomplish it.

In many ways, Jacobs was creating a new technology culture at Creamer from the ground up. Some employees had never even used a computer for work. But Jacobs saw the incredible value that could be derived if the system was fully adopted – namely, improved profit margins.

He worked to establish a “conference room” pilot program, comprising instruction as well as business process visualization workshops. Working from the ground up, these sessions ranged from teaching folks how to use a computer and the basics about ERP all the way through to developing BOMs and BOOs. The team drew up flow charts of the incumbent processes and then, after extensive discussion, redrew the lines to correspond with new workflows.

“Then, we just decided to go ahead and do it,” declared Jacobs.

xTuple ran multiple training sessions for Creamer personnel, and its online user community also gave Creamer a chance to interact with other xTuple customers in order to discuss best practices and even gather code recommendations.

Jacobs values the speed at which personnel can create work orders and the drill down menus that provide the information needed to make sound decisions. But the benefits go well beyond ease of use and high adoption into more measurable returns on investment.

The top measure was a top-level reduction of inventory expenses – and xTuple helped Creamer lop off 50% of unnecessary expenses. In addition, the successful implementation of standard costing also measurably improved profitability, even in the midst of a global economic downturn.

And perhaps most importantly, by the end of the project, Creamer had successfully retooled its business for the future, allowing it to serve both its traditional customer and those that will emerge in the future as it seeks to serve other alternative energy niches such as Wind Technology.

“We’re big xTuple fans,” said Jacobs. “It’s only taken a bit over a year to go from teaching reluctant people very basic skills to seeing them become totally convinced it was the best decision we could have ever made.”