ERP improves operations, customer satisfaction

Stillwell Jacks is a Minnesota-based manufacturer of high-quality hydraulic jacks for customers in the agriculture, construction and automotive industries. After installing new enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, the company was able to automate and streamline order fulfillment and manufacturing processes. Replacing legacy systems, the ERP was implemented company-wide across sales, finance and manufacturing, enabling Stillwell to process up to 30% more customer orders with the same resources.

With a fast-growing business and delivering finished products all across the county, the team at Stillwell quickly realized they needed to ramp-up their overall operations and could no longer rely on their business accounting software package.

“We started out using Quickbooks on the accounting side, but we didn’t have a system in place for manufacturing and order tracking,” says Zac Stillwell, vice president of operations, who explains how they had to print customer orders and then be sure they didn’t get lost in a pile of paperwork. “We worked completely based on memory. In fact, we struggled with keeping track of our orders, and misplacing them could mean costly delays and potentially unsatisfied customers.”

With the new ERP system (Priority Software), Stillwell automated its business processes across the board, from the initial order through to product delivery, minimizing manual work at every stage in the process so that employees could focus on more strategic tasks.

“We’ve taken the manual management out of running the business, which means we can do a lot more with less,” Stillwell says. “With real-time visibility into our order fulfillment and manufacturing workflow, the system saves us considerable time and resources, allowing us to book, build and ship more orders.”

Stillwell also notes that they were able to make changes to the system and personalize it, attributing the system’s ease of use to being well trained by the supplier’s team.

“There wasn’t anything we couldn’t handle ourselves,” he says. “Changing the interface, editing reports and creating queries were all very quick and easy to do. This really allowed the system to work for us.”

Stillwell Jacks reports accelerated delivery time and increased customer satisfaction.

“Our suppliers now get clear signals when we need to buy material and our paperwork stays organized and is consistent, which makes working with larger customers so much easier,” Stillwell says. “We’ve been able to eliminate the overhead time of many routine tasks to focus our efforts on sales and operations. More importantly, we now have a consistent and professional appearance to our customers and suppliers.”