Jul 7, 2010
As the Midwest’s number one resource for buying and selling plastic resins, Discover Plastics has years of experience in virtually every facet of plastics sourcing and manufacturing. From procurement and recycling to injection molding, the team members know that by understanding their customers’ needs, they can deliver exceptional service. That is why each team member’s goal is to know what a customer’s specific current and future requirements are and whether they need a special formulation of resin or standard virgin, regrind or reprocessed resin.
Antiquated system needs to be recycled
In the mid 1990’s Discover Plastics was using a proprietary DOS based system. The accounting system didn’t communicate with the inventory system. This made manual processes a tedious requirement. With the business growing, company executives determined that modernizing and taking advantage of the latest technology was going to be an important component of their success moving into the next millennium. The company embarked on finding a solution to their antiquated system.Â
New Accounting system takes shape
A hardware supplier, working with Discover Plastics, recommended Business Automation Specialists of Minnesota (BASM). “We looked at a number of companies,” recalls Lamar Detert, Vice President of Discover Plastics, “but I was particularly impressed with Ron Ketterling, President of BASM, and the Sage Pro software solution they were presenting. BASM not only understood what we needed from a software standpoint, but also understood how to use it to streamline our business processes.”
With BASM on board, the two companies worked through a complicated implementation. “It was a challenging implementation converting from a DOS based proprietary system, as we were basically starting from scratch,” stated Ron Ketterling, “but we got through it with minimal interruption to Discover Plastics operation.”Â
BASM was also able to customize the Sage Pro system to handle a challenging inventory requirement for Discover Plastics. “Using Sage Pro data drillers, BASM was able to give us immediate access to inventory specifics; such as how much of a particular lot was committed, lot costs and lot specific pricing,” said Lamar. “At any given time we have two to three million pounds of resin on the floor, a portion of which is recycled. Knowing what inventory we had by lot, by color, if it had contamination, and many other factors, was key to our new system really working for us.”Â
New life for Discover Plastics
With accounting and inventory now connected, “We saw a drastic improvement in our processes,” states Lamar. “Thanks to the customization BASM did for our special inventory requirement, and the integration to accounting, we are now able to get information on a real time basis. This has sped up our customer service and ultimately our sales process.”
According to Lamar, “If we had stayed on our old system, we would have had to add two to three people to keep up with our growth. Thanks to BASM and Sage Pro, we’ve been able to manage without adding any staff to handle accounting. Additionally, we previously had to use a CPA firm, but now the information and reports from our accounting system is so thorough, we’ve been able to reduce that cost by handling a majority of it in house.”
