Everest & Jennings is an innovative manufacturer of heath care products for physically challenged people. They are famed for their development of tubular wheelchair technology. They manufacture today’s battery-powered wheelchairs as well as the traditional folding kind. They also produce a range of other related health care products. They operate manufacturing and distributing facilities in Canada, the US and Mexico.

Our work with Everest & Jennings demonstrates what we believe is an efficiently deployed Systems Migration project, bringing technologies and software together under the AS/400 System.

Prior to the migration process, Everest & Jennings’ Canadian IT configuration used two separate systems. One system was for non-manufacturing applications, such as: Inventory, Order Entry, Purchasing and Accounting). These operations were being run on BPCS ERP software. Their other system controlled manufacturing operations such as: Material Resource Planning, Shop Floor Control and Engineering. For this they were using MAPICS manufacturing software in an emulated System/36 environment on AS/400 equipment. The two systems were integrated, but not very efficiently, in that a lot of data had to be ‘mirrored’ on both systems. It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep the two systems in sync and implementation of the KANBAN system was making MAPICS obsolete for them.

Our primary task was to migrate all manufacturing applications from MAPICS to BPCS. There were also many customized applications and databases that the company had developed under System/36. These needed to be converted or re-developed for the AS/400 System.

The project was awarded to Aimsoft because of our extensive knowledge about, and experience with, S/36, AS/400, MAPICS and BPCS integration issues.

The basic migration process called for complete conversion of all manufacturing data. This involved a Master Conversion for all manufactured items with setup table files. Other manufacturing process functions that we converted included: Product Structure/Bill of Material Routings, Work Centre and Jig Setup files, Inventory Control and Item Costing. Because the company also produced customized wheelchairs, it was necessary to deal with the complexities of converting Configured Chair History.

As part of the migration process, we were also called upon to develop new, customized AS/400 software applications for Everest & Jennings. These included: Planning Bill and Forecasting Systems, KANBAN System Implementation, Custom Chair Enhancement Capability and Motor and Controller Serial History.

• The migration process was completed with minimal disruption to ongoing productivity

• MAPICS software was eliminated and the business functioned more efficiently one enterprise-wide software system using the full potential of AS/400

• Productivity and financial gains were achieved by having one integrated data source