Crusader Paper Company – Delivering Custom Orders for Fifty-Six Years and Counting
Crusader Paper Company is an independent merchant and converter of first-grade paper and paperboard. The North Andover, MA company buys first-grade material from mill suppliers, converts roll paper into sheets or smaller rolls and delivers products to the customer designated warehouse or printing plant.
Old Days and Complex Problems
Before implementing the new system from Software Concepts, company executives struggled with their software vendor to automate everyday tasks. One of many difficult tasks was reconciling and tabulating commissions for the sales force. Since each paper order could be customized in multiple ways, with over 30 categories of possible commission schemes, commission calculations were very complex.
Office and production functions depended on older “discrete” applications that were not in an integrated computer application. As a result, common tasks such as invoice checking, bank reconciliation or performing queries against orders were time-consuming, as they required using applications that lacked the necessary cross-system functionality.
Evaluating Software Vendors
The thirty-eight year old sheeting division of the company offers customers specialized slitting, digital rewinding, laminating, embossing and cartoning services. Since the company receives many different types of product orders, with many possible component combinations, it needed highly organized and accessible production data. In addition, ordering data needed to be reconciled with inventory, accounts payable/receivable, general ledger and commission management systems.
Recognizing the limitations in software functionality with respect to production control, as well as the time spent on common office operations and month-end closings, the company formally evaluated software vendors to replace their computer application. Using the following evaluation criteria for assessment—functionality, capability, price, support and reliability—they created a short list of three vendors. After carefully assessing each company’s bid, they chose Software Concepts because of their software design, functionality, capability, flexibility, support and price.
New Days and New Solutions
Deployed April 2003, the system is comprised of an application control system, which provides seamless access to an integrated suite of office applications:
- Order Management
- Production Management
- Inventory Control
- Purchasing
- Sales Analysis
- Commission Management
- Accounts Payable
- Accounts Receivable
- General Ledger
On a daily basis, Crusader Paper uses all of the modules within the DS90 application which runs on IBM’s i520 and is onfigured in an Ethernet 100 MB network. Running trouble-free since the installation, they have already realized significant benefits with the new system:
- Zero crashes and zero minutes of downtime
- Faster month-end closings
- More detailed production data for better efficiency and planning
- Organized, efficient and accurate commission programs
- Reduced time in monthly bank reconciliation, accounts payable and receivable reconciliations
- One phone call for technical support
- Speedy turn around time for software modification requests
