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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 company’s 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 OpenMFG (the former name for the company now known as xTuple) from a list of eight vendors.

Open source experience, implementation best practices

The OpenMFG ERP Suite met or exceeded Cloud-Rider’s manufacturing requirements, but at the time only supported a single currency. Working with one of its Canadian solution provider partners, Yellow Dog Consulting of Vancouver, OpenMFG architected a system-wide multi-currency engine to meet this final requirement. Cloud-Rider was intimately involved in the design and testing of the multi-currency capability, which was a major component of OpenMFG version 2.0, released in the fall of 2006.

Perhaps Cloud-Rider’s comfort with this collaborative development process was related to its use of the open source PostgreSQL database in other company applications. Like the Linux operating system and other well-known open source software, PostgreSQL has a well-earned reputation for rock-solid performance.

“We definitely wanted the PostgreSQL database, which would provide the reliability we needed to provide high levels of customer service,” Devers says. “We also wanted an enterprise-class solution so we wouldn’t outgrow it, and OpenMFG met that need.”

OpenMFG went live at Cloud-Rider after a lengthy pilot testing process, during which Cloud-Rider set up a test environment and ran live data from sales, customer service, production, and accounting. Over the course of this pilot testing, Cloud-Rider got a good feeling for when to follow standard OpenMFG processes and procedures, and when they might want to make additional enhancements to OpenMFG to support Cloud-Rider’s own way of doing things.

The company wisely viewed the move to a new system as an opportunity to clean up old data as well: “We could have chosen to export our current database into the new one, but the reliability of the information was severely compromised,” Devers says. “We chose instead to enter most everything from scratch, and refine the information at the same time.”

Devers gives the implementation process the highest praise possible in the ERP world: “it was pretty uneventful.” She particularly credits their “wonderful lead hand, Norm Jekubik of Yellow Dog, who walked us through.”

Powerful tools, simple to use

On a daily basis, company staff uses OpenMFG to enter orders, run Material Requirements Planning (MRP) to produce the necessary work orders to complete sales orders, and issue parts to shipping. The MRP system keeps component stock at the necessary levels to meet customer demand, with little to no human intervention necessary. “The OpenMFG MRP function is solid, and the inventory tracking is phenomenal,” Devers says. “If used to its full potential, in the right industry, it could even replace a few human bodies!”

Devers is also pleased at the way the software can operate on any platform (Windows, Linux, or Apple Mac) and the ease of system administration. All Cloud-Rider users connect to the same OpenMFG client software on a shared network drive, which dramatically reduces the time to update each workstation. Server updates are accomplished with a database script downloaded from xTuple’s customer portal website.

And OpenMFG 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 OpenMFG ERP Suite. (OpenRPT is an open source project in its own right, maintained by xTuple).

Major improvements across the board

“At this point the benefits of OpenMFG are measured by employee relief, especially in the production and IT departments,” Devers says. “Productivity has increased with the lack of need for human intervention. Also, the system itself needs very little babysitting.”

Other key benefits of OpenMFG at Cloud-Rider include:

• Work orders take 3 seconds instead of 3 minutes to produce
• Price changes take less than an hour, not one week of overtime and “migraines”
• Improved database stability eliminates production hold-ups
• Inventory numbers are very accurate because inventory flow is more efficient and the history is simple to follow in the event of a discrepancy

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 OpenMFG (a product developed by Yellow Dog Consulting). The OpenMFG Wireless client is available today, and runs on any number of handheld devices.

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