In 1988, Peter Hess, president of Albany
Steel, learned that the custom software he had paid to
develop on his company’s Data General system computer
system could not be run on any new Data General computers
due to a redesign operating system. Further, he learned
that his existing Data General operating system did not
support dates beyond Dec. 31, 1999. He became one of
the first people on the planet to discover he had a Y2K
problem.
“If
we were an ordinary steel service center,” Hess says, “it
might have been fairly easy to find or create a software
system that would meet our business management needs.
But Albany Steel is a complicated company, and the search
became a nightmare.”
Albany Steel consists of seven different
divisions:
- Steel service center -- bringing
in steel of all sizes, shapes, and configurations (plates,
pipe, angles, channels, flat bars, plate, and sheet,
to name a few), cutting it, forming it and reselling
it to others.
- Steel fabrication services – making
buildings and bridges out of steel.
- Reinforcing bar – sales, cutting
and bending of “re-bar” for concrete.
- Machine shop – manufacturing custom-machined
parts for companies as far away as Dallas.
- Fasteners – sales and fabrication
of nuts, bolts, screws, and washers.
- Property management – commercial
and residential property that is owned, operated, and
leased.
"Over
the next 3 to 4 years, I spent an enormous amount of
time talking to software companies.” Hess says. “I developed
a detailed specification of the capabilities that the
system must have.”
Among the capabilities that Albany
Steel needed were:
- Tracking 7 different profit centers,
to show profit and loss for each, and to meld them
all into one statement for the entire company.
- Managing 10 cost schedules, so that,
for example, when a truck made deliveries for 4 different
profit centers on the same run, costs would be allocated
appropriately.
- Handling over-the-counter sales
quickly and easily.
- Sophisticated handing of inventory
so that Albany Steel could keep track of inventory
cost and properly price each cut piece.
Hess says, “Inventory is one of the
most difficult things for us. We buy steel by the pound
but we sell it by the piece. Some of the systems that
we looked at would have required us to keep track of
every single individual piece of steel in our shop. When
you move as much steel as we do, that would have been
impossible to manage and impractical to do.”
Fasteners
also presented a special inventory challenge. “Suppose
we order 100 fasteners, and they cost us a nickel apiece,” Hess
says. “So we price them at, say, seven cents. Now, when
the inventory drops, we decide to reorder, and the price
to us has gone up – say 10 cents. Now we need to be able
to price the fasteners according to the average price
of the mixture of old and new fasteners that are in the
bin.”
Otherwise, Hess points out, Albany
Steel might find itself selling 10-cent fasteners for
only 7 cents – clearly not the way to make money.
After several misadventures, including
attempts to commission the development of custom software
to meet the company’s needs, Hess thought he would have
to live with something that was just cobbled together
and not as good as the old system.
But then Albany Steel began looking
at the EXEControl system from Ebeling Associates. “Several
of the companies that we do business with were using
the system and spoke very highly of it,” Hess says. “The
people at Ebeling Associates assured us that their system
could do everything we needed, and then some.”
After installing EXEControl and running
it for four years, he concludes, “It’s the best system
out there today. I don’t know of another package that
can do the job. It’s the most advanced system available
for fabricators, service centers, and companies that
have multiple operations.”
EXEControl even supports a scanning
system that has allowed Albany Steel to reduce a river
of paper – some 40 filing cabinets a year – to a mere
trickle. To find a steel certification, company employees
no longer have to go to a filing cabinet, now they can
find the document in question with just a few key strokes.
Hess adds, “The software has been rock
solid. We handle 200 orders and ship 200,000 pounds of
steel a day. We can’t afford to be down, and we haven’t
been. Further Ebeling has been very responsive whenever
we have a need.”
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