"Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."                                                                                                         ~John F. Kennedy

One of the things that came to light during our recent strategic planning meetings was that in order to meet our future business objectives, it will be necessary to upgrade our business systems.  Our current system has served us well for almost 10 years but we have made the decision to upgrade to the new Activant Prophet 21 windows based operating system.  Our “go live date” is September 4, 2007.

Activant currently is the dominant software provider in the Industrial Distribution market and this new Prophet 21 system has been successfully implemented by over 100 distributors in the past 3 years.  After careful research and visiting with 3 distributors who have installed this system, we believe it is the right solution for Machinery Tooling & Supply (MT&S) and our plan is to eventually add Machinery Systems onto Prophet 21 as well.

So why spend all this money for a new system?  There are several key objectives we believe a change to a new system will help us meet:

• Improved customer service through better order tracking, reporting, and electronic order entry options.
• Improved quality, especially in the area of customer pricing and inventory accuracy.
• Improved efficiencies in inventory management and order processing.
• Ability to offer on-line access to our customers.

Here is the general timeline we are following:

• March – hardware install and system set-up (This is complete - see photo above!)
• April – Employee training on Customer, Vendor, and Item database management
• May – Employee training on all processes including customer orders, purchasing, inventory control, accounting, receiving, and shipping.
• June – Develop standard operating procedures on all processes
• July – Database clean-up and preparation for data conversion
• August – Final training, data input, data conversion
• September – Go Live!!!

It is going to be a very busy (and probably stressful) summer around MT&S but the end result will be worth the pain.  By October 1^st (our fiscal year anniversary date) we should be operating on all cylinders and we can all sit back and watch the Cubs and Sox in the World Series.

Copyright © 1997 Machinery Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Headquarters: 614 E. State Parkway; Schaumburg, IL 60173  847.882.8085   Fax 847.882.2894
Revised: May 31, 2007.