Moline Bearing Company

Moline Bearing Company is a small manufacturer of mounted ball, Type E roller and spherical M2000 bearings, located in St. Charles, Illinois. The company has four additional warehouses across the United States, and does significant overseas business as well.

The company had a need to replace their aging inventory management and accounting software with a true Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. As Moline president David Fauntleroy explains, "Moline is a growing company whose needs had exceeded the capabilities of its previous system. We wanted to get as close as possible to what the big guys use, without having to spend a fortune in the process."

Moline was looking for a solution that could offer:

• Ability to run on the more modern Mac OS X operating system
• An approach that could leverage the power of a full relational database

The legacy software ran on an older version of the Apple Mac OS, and lacked many key features that Moline required, costing the company real money in missed orders and poor inventory tracking. Fauntleroy identified several key drivers in his search for a new ERP system, chief among them the ability to run on the more modern Mac OS X operating system, and an approach that leveraged the power of a full relational database with visibility into detailed inventory history and traceability, and proactive control over all business operations.

That enhancement process built on the open source experience of xTuple's founders. All customers and partners receive full access to the xTuple source code and under an innovative community-based approach, are actually encouraged to make enhancements to the product. xTuple manages the code contributions from partners and customers much like an open source project and actually incorporates those contributions back into the main, company-supported product.

The xTuple solution provides them with:

• Ability to have multiple sessions open in the application at once
• Fully internet-enabled, allowing users to access the system from anywhere
• Increased visibility, allowing users to see everything that is happening in the business
• Better control of the business because you know what to order, when to order and what to produce
• Smaller companies can realize the same benefits of open source software used by larger companies for a fraction of the cost
• xTuple solution providers who are trained to work with end-user customers to help understand business objectives like efficiency, improved performance, etc.

A local xTuple partner, Frank Parks, adds, "The entire Enterprise Assessment (EA) process was a win-win solution. It allowed all of us to identify enhancements, costs, risks and requirements. This allowed us to bring the project up on time and on budget with satisfied users. The EA allowed Moline to benefit from the expertise of savvy manufacturing and ERP veterans and more importantly, led directly to the implementation of key functionality that Moline needed to improve its business processes based on our recommendations."