Newrent had been using a proprietary non-Windows® billing system that required duplicate data entry and plenty of manual support. The system couldn’t distinguish between inventory; the team had to hike through the 8-acre parking lot to figure out which trailers were for rent or for sale. Answering customer inquiries quickly and accurately was quite a challenge. As Newrent grew, its system began experiencing glitches with alarming frequency. It simply couldn’t handle the increase in rental volume. Staff members eventually lost confidence in it. Its utility was now little more than an adding and accounting machine. The firm couldn’t afford to continue this way any longer, so Fitzhenry began searching for a new automated package.

Christian Broadcasting Network, Inc. (CBN) is a large television ministry that relies heavily on donations. The organization was facing challenges with its financial and planning systems. The systems for purchasing, cost accounting, inventory, and budgeting were from different vendors or home-grown, leading to redundancies and inefficiencies. This lack of integration was hindering the organization's ability to manage expenses effectively. The organization needed a project-based budgeting model to align the budget process with business drivers and strategic goals.

Namco Cybertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Namco Limited of Japan and the largest video arcade operator in the United States, was facing a significant challenge. With over 500 stores, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the company to provide managers with the data they needed to measure and analyze store performance. The resources to budget at the store level were limited, making it difficult for district and general managers to track and analyze store performance. At a corporate level, management lacked insight into which stores were underperforming, or why certain stores were doing well. The company needed a solution that would allow them to develop detailed budgets for each of its 500+ stores, without adding more staff.

The Resource Center, a not-for-profit healthcare agency, was struggling with an inefficient and time-consuming manual budgeting process that did not allow for sophisticated analysis and planning. The annual budget process involved the creation of a Lotus spreadsheet for each of more than 200 cost centers, each containing a few years of historical data, as well as last year’s budget and actuals. The budget data was then reentered into a legacy system, with the budget cycle concluding in late December. The process for allocating expenses across the agency was also complex and time-consuming, involving many days each month of manual data entry and rekeying.

Narron Construction, a road construction company based in North Carolina, was facing challenges in tracking job cost data for better analysis of time and material charges per project. The company had been using Sage 50—U.S. Edition as its accounting package during its startup years. However, with growth came the need for more complex cost-assessment capabilities. The company needed a solution that could automate the tracking of job cost data, streamline data entry tasks, and ensure greater accuracy throughout the company.

Sullivan Construction, a company that handles projects such as the Hewlett-Packard campus in Corvallis, Oregon, and roads, large building pads, and subdivisions around Albany and Oregon’s mid-Willamette Valley, was facing several challenges. The company was initially using Sage DacEasy for its accounts, but as the company grew, it needed a more robust solution. The company was struggling with tracking job cost information on spreadsheets, which was time-consuming. The reporting requirements were hampering federal agency work, and the complex wage structure was difficult to manage. Profits were virtually incalculable due to these challenges. The company also had a sister company, A.J. Crushing, Inc., where Sullivan’s owner is a partner, and a rental subsidiary, both of which needed a robust solution for their operations.

St. Joseph Paper and Packaging is a busy distributor with a large and well-stocked warehouse. The company requires tools to effectively and efficiently manage its inventory as well as modern sales tools to enable its sales representatives to close more—and more profitable sales. The company implemented Sage 100 ERP nearly a decade ago, selecting the solution primarily for its strong inventory management and warehousing functionality. The company’s 35,000 square-foot warehouse houses more than 8,500 different items. “We need software that helps us effectively manage all that stock,” says John Giczewski, purchasing manager for St. Joseph Paper and Packaging. “Keeping the right mix of products on hand without costly overstocking is key, and Sage 100 ERP helps us do that. It’s quick and responsive software that provides us with a great deal of insight and control over our inventory.”

OptoSigma had been using an older version of Sage PFW ERP which was no longer meeting its needs. The company was looking for a powerful, modern ERP solution that could meet all of its requirements. The company needed a solution that was intuitive to use, had strong inventory control capabilities, and bill of materials functionality. The company also wanted a solution that could be easily customized to match its workflow.

AM Appliance Group, Inc. is a North American wholesaler of high-end washers, dryers, and dishwashers from European manufacturers ASKO and Eurotech. The company supports 25 major distributors selling to appliance dealerships across the United States and Canada. However, the company was struggling with its entry-level software which was not able to keep up with the company's growth. The software would often shut down during periods of peak usage and had to be restarted. The company was also struggling with its spare parts division which was outsourced to a parts distributor. This was both cumbersome and costly. The company was also struggling with tracking its orders in transit from European manufacturers. The company also had to manually process warranty claims which was time-consuming and inefficient.

Betachem, a pharmaceutical ingredients importer, was using an outdated proprietary system for its accounting functions until 1998. The company was in need of a comprehensive package that could automate both the accounting and operational sides of its business. This included maintaining batch and lot data, monitoring returned products, and providing a better-informed sales force. Additionally, the company faced challenges with returned merchandise, a common issue in the pharmaceutical industry. Minor shipping damages could render an entire drum of product unusable, and many of Betachem’s customers, large, publicly traded companies, required Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) numbers on all returned goods. Previously, numbers were assigned by hand using a log, and fulfillment instructions were maintained elsewhere. The entire return process took five separate steps.

GCI Outdoor, a company that designs, manufactures, and distributes a variety of outdoor chairs, was facing challenges with its entry-level QuickBooks accounting software. The software was unable to track future orders and lacked sophisticated inventory-control features such as multiple warehouse and material requirements planning (MRP) functionality. The company was relying on dozens of spreadsheets to track sales and stock levels, which was becoming unmanageable. The order processing time was long, often taking 24 hours to get a new order out the door. Return processing was also a cumbersome manual process involving three-ring binders and much paper shuffling. The company needed a solution that could streamline these processes and provide accurate supply and demand data for lean operation.

M6 Concrete Accessories, a company comprising three separate departments - concrete and masonry distribution, steel fabrication, and equipment rentals and sales, was struggling with its legacy system. Each department was on a different business system, leading to data duplication and difficulty in obtaining consolidated reports. Some reports, like detailed margin reports, could not be created at all. The company was in need of a unified system that could manage all its operations seamlessly.

Packaging Specialties, a company providing creative and innovative packaging supplies to retailers, required a robust, full-featured ERP solution that could provide core accounting and distribution functionality while supporting specialized reporting requirements and remote access. The company's business is largely seasonal, necessitating the ability to forecast demand based on prior year sales to ensure proper stocking levels are maintained. The company also needed a solution that could support its sales-driven approach and provide robust sales analysis tools to help refine its forecasts and product mix.

Premier Marketing, a car audio system distributor, was facing challenges with its existing accounting system. The company had initially selected a DOS version of Sage 50—U.S. Edition as their accounting system, along with a parallel bookkeeping system. However, as the company grew and added a distribution services division, it needed a more robust software to manage the distribution side of the business and handle increased transaction volume. The company migrated to Sage BusinessWorks Accounting, but by 2001, the remote operations had become more sophisticated, and dial-up communications were no longer acceptable. The company needed a solution that could manage distribution, handle huge increases in transaction volume, and permit greater remote access.

Silk Botanica, a San Francisco-based company that sells premium-quality permanent flowers, foliage, and decorative accessories, experienced significant growth since its inception in 1995. The company expanded its workforce to 20 employees, established a network of independent sales representatives across the nation, and saw revenues soar to more than $10 million. With the addition of a full warehouse and complex shipping requirements, Silk Botanica needed to upgrade its business system capabilities. The company was using Sage 50—U.S. Edition, which was well-suited for the start-up phase but could not handle the company's expanded operations and complex requirements.

Xtrac, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance transmissions for top motorsport teams, was facing a challenge with its initial Sage BusinessWorks accounting system. The company had expanded its business lines, adding NHRA, GrandAm, Motocross, and other lines, which led to the outgrowing of its initial accounting system within just one year. The company needed a more robust system to manage its financials, including customer orders, invoicing, parts ordering, tracking and reporting back orders, inventory control, paying vendors, cutting checks, and accounts receivable and collections.

Zee Medical Service of Reading, PA, a family-owned and operated company for over 25 years, was facing challenges with its outdated UNIX-based system. The system was not Y2K compliant and lacked forecasting data or insights on individual customer buying patterns. It was unable to sustain the company's growth and serve its needs for mobile order fulfillment or e-commerce. Each of Zee Medical’s 32 vans is a mobile warehouse. The better its inventory matches customers’ needs, the better its daily sales and the fewer back orders processed. The company needed a powerful, fully automated inventory management system that could handle the expanding demands of 32 “mobile warehouses” and a high volume of users.

anDea Chocolate and Supplies, a chocolate manufacturer and distributor based in Ontario, Canada, was facing operational challenges. The company, which generates 40% of its revenue from five major trade shows every year, was struggling with a cumbersome and inefficient order-taking process. At each trade show, the team had to manually take orders and build relationships with customers. After returning from the trade shows, they would spend at least two weeks manually adding up orders and entering them into their old software program. Additionally, processing batches of credit card orders could take up to 45 minutes during the busy season, as numbers had to be entered twice for preauthorization and final authorization. The information in anDea’s business system was so inaccurate that reports had become meaningless.

Covenant Transport, a top U.S. revenue-generating truckload carrier, was facing a challenge. The company needed to manage increased interactions between carriers and trading partners while upgrading from the AS/400 platform. The company was looking for a scalable integration solution that could be configured with new technology and business processes. The solution needed to seamlessly integrate with the IBM platform, internal applications like TMW Suite, and trading partners.

Century Distribution Systems was facing challenges with data integration and exception handling. The company was using multiple systems to handle customers’ EDI transactions and data integration mapping, which resulted in inefficient use of time in the creation and maintenance of custom interfaces. Each customer had unique requirements in terms of how they store and receive data from customers, suppliers, and partners. Century was using multiple applications for EDI data integration and to build interfaces from start to finish for each data feed. This significantly slowed the process of getting customers up and running and proved to be an inefficient use of resources. Another challenge was exception handling. An error in a purchase order or invoice could mean a delay in shipment, which ultimately damages relationships and potentially incurs significant fees.

SPP Pumps had a completely manual processes to manage and schedule more than 60 field service calls a day for their 30+ field engineers. The invoice generation process took up to 14 days to complete, typically. It involved paper forms; signed and then faxed back to the office. Administrative staff had to manually enter work order information into SAP before an invoice could be generated and sent to the customer for payment. There was no guarantee that what was faxed and entered was accurate or complete.

SPP Pumps had a completely manual process to manage and schedule more than 60 field service calls a day for their 30 field engineers. The mechanism of generating an invoice from the field could take up to 14 days to complete. Service engineers filled out paper forms, signed them, and then faxed the forms back to the head office for each service call. Their administrative staff then had to manually enter work order information into SAP before an invoice could be generated. This manual system of filling out paper forms was time-consuming, resulted in many errors, and created cash flow problems for the company. This paper base system also siloed service engineers from the sales teams and the supply chain hindering communication. Often service engineers would show up to sites without the correct parts or leave without being able to identify to the sales team potential business at the customer sites.

The State of Iowa's Department of Administrative Services (DAS) was tasked with maintaining a database of debtors within a vendor-offset program. This required the integration of data from both inside and outside the state's network. In 2007, legislation was passed allowing county and city agencies to add their debtors to the database, leveraging the state's data processing power to secure payments of locally oriented debts. This new program required the database to pull information from dozens of different file types. The challenge was that thousands of files from local agencies were inundating the database with incomplete files and mismatched data.

The transportation industry is extremely fragmented with few standards and common practices. The flaw in the way supply chains have worked since biblical times is that every party in a transaction has partial data. By Truckl's metrics, 1 in 3 truckloads is flawed in some way. The shipment is late, or it never arrives. The order is partially shipped, or the wrong parts are sent. Nobody in the chain has all the data. In total, data gaps in the supply chain cost the world economy as much as $3 trillion. Mobile phone technology has the potential to correct this ancient flaw.

Compassion International, a humanitarian aid child sponsorship organization, was facing challenges with its gifting process. The process was not completely automated, leading to manual re-keying of information, which introduced costly errors and duplicate data. This duplicate data resulted in questionable reporting and made the entire process cumbersome to manage. The lack of information flow negatively impacted the adoption of Salesforce, leading to lost productivity and wasted license fees. The poor data quality also threatened to compromise management decisions.

Intelliflo, a leading provider of practice management software to the UK's Financial industry, was facing a challenge of inefficient flow of business data. Business initiatives were often stymied by a lack of underlying IT development processes to support them. Valuable data was available but often hidden in silos both on-premise and in the cloud. Innovation was inhibited rather than enabled by technology. The company had financial data in NetSuite and customer data in Salesforce, with duplicate data in both. Rekeying data was prone to error and customers were required to access different applications to find needed information. New SaaS applications were not enhancing business processes or supporting growth strategies.

Balfour Beatty Construction, a world-class engineering, construction, services and investment business, was implementing a new ERP system and found that it needed an integration solution to forge a reliable link between new and existing business systems. The company had been using a custom-coded integration solution, but rewriting it to meet the new needs was not feasible due to the required investment of time and money. The in-house scripts used to move data were unmanageable and costly to maintain. The company needed a cost-effective, quickly deployed platform alternative.

WaterAid, an international non-profit organization, was facing challenges with their data management and reporting processes. The organization had to deal with manual oversight processes, duplicate data, and rekeying of information which introduced costly errors. Their data, processes, and systems were fragmented, and development officers were required to access many different applications to get the information they needed. The process of integrating various applications and systems was taking a couple of staff-days to code per month. Synthesizing and reporting information, as well as documenting events and activities, were complex. Graphs were not automatically calculated and needed to be tracked through monthly postings.

Dot Foods, the largest food service redistribution company in the United States, was struggling with legacy systems that created silos of information. The company's accounts, locations, contact, preferred customer communications, and sales history were all caught on IBM technology first introduced in 1979. The company was using AS/400 based custom coded systems which led to duplicate data and fragmentation of data, processes, and systems. This resulted in an unstable digital infrastructure and reporting was slow and prone to inaccuracy. The company needed a solution that would allow them to phase out the AS/400 applications without disruption while improving data quality and reducing manual entry.

Skullcandy, a leading audio brand, was facing challenges with its data management and business processes. The company had been using ad hoc methods to share information between its ERP, web stores, and shipping partners. This approach was proving to be too time-consuming and prone to errors. The company needed to connect its SAP ByDesign system with storefronts and shipping providers to enable visibility between SAP ByDesign, Magento, webshops, and 3PLs. They also needed to interface with SPS Commerce EDI orders from big box retailers like Best Buy and Target.