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In an industry known for slavish attention to fashion and passing trends, The Marena Group has made its bet on a classic: American manufacturing. This Lawrenceville, Georgia maker of compression garments for athletic and post-surgical use has found that by embracing cutting-edge technology, it can produce garments domestically at a cost that competes favorably with offshore alternatives. In fact, the company exports roughly half its domestically-made goods to overseas markets — a true exception in the garment field.

A key component of The Marena Group's technology base is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that optimizes the company's manufacturing operations and interaction with the supply chain. After many years with one product, VISUAL Manufacturing (recently acquired by Infor Global Solutions), the company found reasons to explore alternatives.

"Our existing application had undergone numerous updates and add-ons over time, making it difficult to maintain," said John Rogelstad, Director of Operations. "What's more, our software vendor didn't respond promptly or appropriately to change requests or reports of conflicts, which was putting a drain on our limited IT resources."

One other trend driving the search, however, was the onset of open source software — and the freedom and control over technology investments that comes with it. Marena was looking at the possibility of working with multiple systems over and above their ERP back-end, including a configure-to-order Web store. Already unhappy with the status quo with Infor, Rogelstad and his team felt perhaps an open source approach might be the answer.

Lower Cost, Greater Reliability

So the team began looking at the entire field of ERP choices. Eventually they narrowed their search to two final candidates: SAP, a well-known, international ERP provider; and OpenMFG, a young company that has embraced open source in building its ERP solution.

"There really aren't very many high quality open source ERP alternatives on the market. OpenMFG was the only one we felt confident in," Rogelstad reported. "We decided that although OpenMFG is comparatively unknown, it has a lot going for it. It was much cheaper — on the order of one-fifth the cost — and more cohesive than the SAP offering. We realized that we could implement OpenMFG and link it to our Web store, all for the price of simply upgrading our old ERP system."

Another factor was the disconnect between sales hype and product reality, he noted. "The [SAP] product was riddled with several untested modules from third parties, which made us a bit nervous." With OpenMFG, they had full access to the entire product, and were able to test it extensively during the sales process. "We also liked the open source philosophy of being able to contribute to product improvement directly."

Once Marena made its decision to go with OpenMFG, it began the process of setup and installation — a straightforward affair, according to Rogelstad. "We just did a basic data and process conversion. There were no surprises." Within five weeks of purchasing the product, Marena took OpenMFG live.

Almost immediately, they saw the benefits of OpenMFG at the heart of their manufacturing operations. "It's a lot of fun to work with," Rogelstad said. He noted that OpenMFG’s support for the Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems (on both the server and the client) has given his company new technology options. For example, while the Marena Group uses standard Windows clients on Dell hardware, the company took the occasion of the OpenMFG project to introduce its first Linux server.

The catalyst for this decision was actually a Windows-based virus which "tore apart our entire Microsoft network," Rogelstad said. Among the applications that were sidelined were the Microsoft SQL Server database and the Infor VISUAL product. Marena had been running OpenMFG on the open source PostgreSQL database in parallel, on the same Windows server - and it was not affected by the virus. As for the Windows clients, "We copied OpenMFG executables on local machines with a thumb drive and had OpenMFG up and running in less than an hour. It took months to reassemble the Microsoft domain completely."

The OpenMFG/Linux server has had no interruptions since going live.

Removing Constraints

One of the biggest plusses Marena has realized since the introduction of OpenMFG is a drop in production lead time. The company has 200 to 300 different orders in process at any given time, so controlling and coordinating raw material orders and inventory is a challenge. With OpenMFG in-house, however, Rogelstad had the opening he needed to make a big change.

"We've given the Theory of Constraints model a modern-day boost by creating and implementing a bolt-on to OpenMFG," he said. "It’s a buffer management system, which prioritizes the shipping of items in the factory according to what is needed at the moment. By expediting their movement through the shop floor, we have increased our efficiency substantially." Since introducing the module, Marena’s production lead time has dropped from almost a week to just four hours.

Like other modules in OpenMFG, the buffer management code eschews proprietary terminology, and hews tightly to industry standards from respected manufacturing groups such as APICS. Rogelstad took the time to understand OpenMFG coding conventions and data models, and found it very simple to create the functionality he wanted. After a public review of the code, and in-house Quality Assurance testing, OpenMFG will be incorporating the buffer management code into a forthcoming release of the officially-supported product.

"This is the beauty of open source," Rogelstad commented. "You get the benefit of many eyes checking each other's programming. It's the same principle that Freedom of Speech brings to our culture. Open and free dialog leads to higher quality debate — or in this case, higher quality software."

With OpenMFG at the helm of The Marena Group's manufacturing operations, Rogelstad is confident his company has the platform in place that will enable future growth. OpenMFG helps the firm not only stay price-competitive with its overseas and domestic competition, but also manage the hugely diverse array of products offered.

"OpenMFG is easier to administer and more stable than our old system. We expect it will deliver a high ROI over time," Rogelstad concluded. "In simple terms, it just works. I really appreciate that."