ERP Selection: Water Gremlin Case Study

As Scott Schulz, vice president of finance at Water Gremlin, was looking for new enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, the company’s old ERP was fraying at the edges, causing inefficiencies in manufacturing and delays in gathering financial data. ERPs are software systems that integrate information, ranging from orders and accounting figures to manufacturing and human resources data, into one master program.

White Bear Lake–based Water Gremlin got its start making lead fishing sinkers and then expanded into lead-acid battery terminals for the marine, agricultural, and automotive markets. “At our core we make parts, we stock parts, we take orders, we ship orders,” Schulz says, but the old software was not efficiently addressing those functions.

“We were faced with an outdated technology—old software running on an old platform,” he says. “There was basically one person in the organization that understood how it all came together. The reliance on that one person is obviously a risk to us.”

Finding an ERP that fits a unique manufacturing company requires getting executive support for the project, evaluating the possibilities, and then implementing the system and training for it.

Supporting the Business

Schulz wanted ERP software that, in real time, provided insight into how well the business was operating. With the old system, he had to wait until the end of the month when the books were closed to know the company’s financial standing.

In addition, a lot of valuable data was not accessible through the old ERP system. “We just didn’t feel we got a sufficient amount of management information out of our existing system,” Schulz says. Some information was isolated in different departments of the company, and some information was not being shared in a timely way. Some departments avoided using the old ERP, creating their own Excel spreadsheets to accomplish tasks—such as recording manufacturing data—but not entering the data into the ERP, either because there wasn’t a place for it in the system or the software lacked the necessary capabilities.

Also, the Water Gremlin software had been updated over the years and various new modules were introduced to bridge “gaps.” For instance, the contact management system and manufacturing system were not initially linked. “People were writing code in the programs, and when they left, no one could figure them out,” says Mary Connor, a field consultant for Minnesota Technology, Inc., a Minneapolis-based business consulting organization that worked on the Water Gremlin ERP-selection project. The resulting system was cobbled together with pieces of software that didn’t necessarily integrate well with each other.