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Madill Equipment and Syspro |
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By Jeff Keller
Founded in 1911 in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Madill Equipment makes heavy equipment exclusively for the logging industry.
Madill’s rugged and technologically advanced yarders, loaders, feller bunchers and harvester/processors, are engineered and manufactured at the company’s 100,000-sq.ft. facility in Nanaimo, and at its 38,000-sq.ft. plant in Kalama, Washington. Highly regarded for performance, durability and reliability, Madill’s equipment is sold and distributed through offices in the northwest U.S., British Columbia and Alberta.
Over the past decade, Madill has experienced superior growth, both organically and as the result of strategic acquisitions. In 2005, Madill attracted the attention of private equity firm Sentinel Capital Partners, which acquired Madill in a transaction valued at $80-million CDN.
“When I started at Madill in 2006,” says President and CEO Rich Enners, “I found that there were improvements that could be made in the company’s infrastructure, ranging from how we supported the product in the field, to the sales, administrative and some manufacturing processes. What I did was establish a high-level overall strategy on two fronts, designed to enable us to grow the business at the rate of 15 percent a year.”
One of Enner’s strategic fronts is geographic expansion. “Madill is gearing up to export product to other parts of the world,” says Enners. “That means expanding sales eastward in North America, as well as exporting to countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Russia and Chile.” Enners’ second strategy is to improve productivity within the organization. “Using SYSPRO as a base system,” says Enners, “which we found to be very acceptable, we purchased new modules that would help us streamline administrative processes, and improve sales and some manufacturing and inventory control processes.”
Arnie Marks is Madill’s Manager of Information Services, in charge of hardware, software, infrastructure and security on both sides of the border. Marks has been with Madill for 15 years. When first hired, Madill had just purchased Impact Award, SYSPRO’s original enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Over the past decade and a half, Marks has seen the company’s IT systems evolve from dumb terminals, to PCs talking to UNIX, to the current incarnation of PCs talking to e.NET and SQL in a Windows environment.
“So far this year,” says Marks, “we’ve made substantial investments in the IT arena; in systems, in new modules, and in upgrading the environment. We moved from UNIX to Windows in one fell swoop, which is no small feat. We’re right up to speed now.” This year, adds Marks, Madill will be implementing SYSPRO’s Office Automation, .NET, Materials Requirements Planning (MRP), Sales Forecasting, Return Material Authorization (RMA) and Return to Vendor (RTV) modules.
“We purchased the MRP” says Enners, “to forecast long lead-time components and manage the rescheduling of material, as well as to determine critical shortages for the assembly and fabrication departments. This, combined with LEAN processes, will form the basis of a state-of-the-art manufacturing system. We also purchased the inventory optimization tool, that will allow us to forecast the demand requirements for service parts. That will improve our parts order fulfillment, as well as help us better manage our inventory. We purchased RMA to streamline the return of parts back from our sales branches and independent distributors. Finally, we purchased the Return to Vendor module to control the return and exchange of components to suppliers, with better visibility and tracking.”
Marks is confident that the company’s new systems will give Madill the edge it needs to expand the company’s geographical markets. “We began networking with frame relay, then went to ADSL. Now we’re installing fibre optics—that will accommodate our expected growth, which we assume will be both domestic and international. SYSPRO is well-suited to go into both of those arenas with its multi-linguistic and multi-currency capabilities.”
Marks is also sanguine on the prospect of improved productivity. “Today’s SYSPRO allows you to run your company in a much more seamless way than before. That’s excellent for overall productivity. Since beginning our current implementation, the number of transactions per employee has increased greatly, while at the same time the cost per transaction has been driven down. At the end of the day that means more profit for the company.”
“What we’ve done in the last six to eight months,” says Doug Bennett, Madill’s CFO, “is to bring the company into the 21st century. In order to meet our strategic goals, we needed to upgrade our system to the latest and greatest, in a Windows environment.” In the past, says Bennett, Madill operated without MRP or sales forecasting modules. “Those of us who have used those tools know that they’re going to save us a lot of money. In the old environment, the company had to jump through several hoops to write reports, but now, with Crystal Reports embedded in the SYSPRO software, report writing will be a much simpler task.”
Marks agrees, and adds that Crystal Reports will further improve productivity by enhancing employee collaboration. “All of our reporting data is now easily accessed by the user community,” says Marks. “If you want a company to grow you have to make real-time information available to your employees—then they can actually influence the month or quarter that they’re in. In addition, we’ll be saving money by not using pre-printed forms.”
In the final analysis, says Marks, Madill’s investment in IT infrastructure has been money well spent. “I’ve looked over the invoices for everything we’ve bought,” says Marks, “including the initial investment in Impact. Fifteen years later we’re spending the same amount of money for new servers and new modules, and we’re getting a magnitude of 40X improvement. The investment we’ve made has not been extravagant, and the scalability of our systems is excellent. We’re growing and growing, and SYSPRO has come right along with that growth.”
Jeff Keller is a Vancouver, BC-based freelance writer and editor. He wrote this article on behalf of SYSPRO (www.syspro.com)
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