QAD Full Life Cycle Implementation ­Legacy Systems Consolidation and Corporate Financials Integration

The Client

For more than 80 years, our client has been making progress possible and driving positive and sustainable change on every continent. With 2006 sales and revenues of $41.517 billion, it is the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, and industrial gas turbines.

Its products and components are manufactured in 50 U.S. facilities and in over 60 other locations, in 23 countries around the globe.

Logan Consulting worked with the vertically integrated internal casting supplier to the construction and mining equipment facilities around the globe. The supplier manufactures engine blocks and liners to these facilities and a limited number of external customers

The Opportunity

Our client used over 15 different legacy systems centered around an aging COBOL system which was supported primarily by one analyst who was not located at the facility and seldom available on site. This presented a significant IT risk. The business only utilized about 30-40% of the ERP backbone’s functionality, leveraging a series of home grown systems based on MS Access and Excel, in addition to multiple smaller off the shelf systems. Forced staff and cost reductions was placing additional risk and pressure on this infrastructure.

Shop floor transactions were entered primarily in batch by office staff based on manually maintained line and shift logs. This lead to a general lack of data confidence and concern about data timeliness due to the constant delay in data being entered in the system.

All financial activity was handled through corporate systems with custom interfaces from the local shop floor and order processing systems.

The foundry recently initiated a strategic initiative to shift much of the small size high volume casting business to a Mexican Joint Venture, focusing on larger casting production at its primary US Midwest facility, which was the focus of this implementation. This shift presented the business resources with additional strategic tasks that pulled them away from planned QAD Implementation project work.

The Solution

Specific to the financial reporting requirements of the business, the company and Logan Consulting developed a single database multiple domain configuration. The operational domain includes both the US and Canadian Entities, all the planning and inventory sites as well as supports the business for all the manufacturing, distribution and financial reporting requirements (to the parent GE company in US dollar functional currency). The Canadian Domain is a financial account domain only. The Canadian entity in the Operation domain is consolidated and translated (from US dollar currency to Canadian currency) to the Canadian Domain.

The Results

Our client selected QAD’s MFG/Pro to replace most of the un-integrated and unsupported legacy systems. QAD was a corporately supported system which allowed our client to reduce and eliminate certain local support staff and gain support from the corporate Center of Excellence (COE).

Servicing as Project Management for the implementation, Logan Consulting worked in conjunction with the Corporate COE and internal team throughout the project, balancing COE desires for standardization with local requirements.

Using the standard Logan Consulting Implementation Methodology, Logan Consulting and the internal IT Staff implemented the following applications and functionality:

  • Full QAD Distribution Functionality, including customer and supplier schedules, requisitions, and inventory control.
  • Full QAD Manufacturing functionality including advanced repetitive, work orders, MRP and real-time shop floor control facilitated by a low cost efficient scanner solution
  • Custom but standardized interfaces for AR, AP and GL to corporate financial systems.
  • Reporting and ad-hoc reporting / analysis