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For more than 60 years, Prudential Lighting has engineered and produced high quality fluorescent luminaires made right here in the USA. Whether it’s collaborating with leading architects and lighting designers on a new treatment, or refining a classic, successful design, Prudential Ltg. is always driven by innovation. Our national network of independent sales representatives is among the most knowledgeable and service oriented in the lighting industry.
Our ERP journey has been quite an adventure. The first ERP system that Prudential chose was not SYSPRO- we first went live with Oracle. The fit was never ideal. It was obvious that Prudential was a small fish in Oracle’s very large Tier 1 ERP pond. In order to make the system work, we ended up putting a lot of money into consulting and customization fees. What resulted was something of a Humpty Dumpty system that, if we were lucky, managed an entire week without collapsing and requiring assistance from more consultants to put back together.
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We lived with this system, adding in pieces here and there as we could make them fit. We could tell that it was not ideal, but it was a case of knowing your enemy. It was the system we knew. In 2010 it became very apparent that we needed to get out.
Part of our issue with Oracle was that it had a license structure that is not friendly to the mid-size or smaller manufacturer. Rather than a concurrent user structure, Oracle utilizes a named user structure. For a smaller company that had been set up on Oracle many years before without an in house person dedicated to its maintenance, this was a disaster. We ended up with many users named for modules that had never used the module, users that had left the company, and users that needed temporary access that had never been removed as a named user. Each one required a license fee every year, for each module. Long story short, it became cost prohibitive to continue with Oracle with the licensing structure. The licensing issue became the final push to get us to embrace a new system.
While researching ERP companies, we found SYSPRO through a simple Internet search. We reached out to them via the web site and immediately heard back from them. We spoke with SYSPRO and set up a JAD session with the implementation team.
From the moment the JAD team walked through the door it was apparent that we were no longer small fish. We were treated with respect as the team took the time to not only understand how we did our business, but also why we did it in the manner that we do. They listened to every issue we had with our current system, they proposed how things could work in SYSPRO, and they outlined a path to success.
We had a short window of opportunity to choose an ERP system and to implement it. SYSPRO had the approach nailed down for just this scenario. Working with the implementation team, Prudential was able to setup the system, scrub and then convert data from Oracle into SYSPRO, implement a bar coding and hand held solution and train users in just four months.
Prudential Lighting offers a wide range of catalogued parts with a huge amount of options for every fixture. We also offer custom luminaires designed as partners with our customers. This leads us to a daunting amount of stock codes to deal with. SYSPRO worked with us to organize the data and helped us come up with ways to maintain counts and organization of over 140,000 stock codes.
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Due to the variety in our catalogue and our make-to-order environment, we had to come up with a way to enter our orders without sorting through thousands of stock codes. The solution we chose was to utilize the Product Configurator. We had a unique method of creating the descriptions we use for our products which consists of horizontally concatenating all of the options that the customer has chosen into one unique description for that product. This was not something that appeared to be immediately available using SYSPRO. What we found was that by thinking outside of the box, we were able to utilize what was in the box with SYSPRO. The customer is not expected to bend to the software; the team at SYSPRO is always up to the challenge of making the software work for the customer.
The difference has been astounding. Within the first week, it was apparent that the right choice had been made. The SYSPRO system is stable. No longer are we spending a fortune on consultants and IT support just to keep the system running, like we were with Oracle. No longer are we battling our own customizations. What we gained by switching to SYSPRO was freedom to do our business and have a system working for us rather than working to make the system function.
SYSPRO utilizes a completely different approach to business than the Tier 1 vendors do. No customer is a small fish to SYSPRO. Our experience has been a partnership. Both companies are invested in making Prudential Lighting a success. When issues come up, a simple phone call or email leads directly to support from SYSPRO.
About a year ago we had a system-wide hardware disaster. Our servers failed and it was at that point that we found out that our backups were not being written correctly. When we contacted SYSPRO in a panic, they immediately sprang into action to help us. We spent a week recovering data, rebuilding our system and getting caught up. Every step of the way, they were there with us. SYSPRO USA had us in touch with others on the international team and we had employees staying late with us, helping us over the weekend. We had our hand held every step of the way during that extremely trying time. SYSPRO went above and beyond the call of duty to guide us and get us back on track. There is no way if we were still a small fish in a large pond that we could ever have gotten that attention and care.
For any company that is feeling the pain of being the small fish in the large Tier 1 ERP company pond, consider SYSPRO as the alternative. There is no reason to continue to try to make your company fit the mold that is set by these companies. Although they make work well for some, for others it is frustrating and costly to try to fit into their models. SYSPRO has been the perfect solution for Prudential Lighting. We gave up paying third party companies to bridge the gap between how the software worked and what we needed. What we gained was a stable system and a partnership that is beyond compare.
-Jaime Ditterline, Prudential Lighting
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Jaime Ditterline has worked with Prudential Lighting for 8 years. She wears many hats at the company but is primarily in charge of implementing and managing software solutions. She is the in-house Crystal Reports writer and in charge of maintaining the Syspro solution. She believes that most companies would benefit from an ERP solution and that there is great opportunity for employees to advance in their careers as they embrace the task of implementing software.
SYSPRO is the leading supplier of ERP software to mid-market manufacturers and distributors. SYSPRO has more than 14,500 licensed customers in over 60 countries around the globe. If you’d like an ERP expert to contact you and further discuss how SYSPRO ERP can streamline your business processes, please contact us here.