Kord Plastics is a manufacturer of products for the horticultural industry. They produce plastic items such as planter pots and hanging baskets, and also manufacture fibre products such as bedding plant packs. Kord Plastics’ operations included four manufacturing plants and two distribution centres. They market their products on the corporate level to retail gardening supply stores. Their Canadian operations were being run on AS/400 using CMS (Canadian Manufacturing System) software.

A new corporate model was being established for Kord Plastics: the distribution company and four manufacturing plants were being spun off as separate business entities. Aimsoft was called in to advise senior management and evaluate business application software in light of the restructured company. The ‘new’ distribution company needed to be integrated (from both business and IT perspective) with its ‘former’ manufacturing facilities, as if they were outside suppliers. New business processes had to be designed and implemented. CMS software was in place but had never been fully implemented. Mission-critical functions such as production planning were being run on stand-alone PCs.

Since Kord Plastics was evolving into five separate companies, we recognized the need for establishing an IT infrastructure for each, one that would enable them to still benefit from shared information. We solved this problem by creating a ‘common systems area’ that enabled mutual business intelligence gathering and information integration, while allowing the companies to remain at arm’s length from each other.

The budget for the restructured organization did not allow for the purchase of five separate CMS software licenses. We configured their systems in a way that permitted all the companies to share the same software, while maintaining operational independence..

Specific software solutions involved creating a ‘finished goods interface’ that efficiently automated production reporting and receiving. We also developed a new, more accurate forecasting application for their marketing departments.

• Sharing of CMS licenses saved the company about $750,000.00

• The five new companies’ operational independence allowed senior management to run the overall organization more efficiently

• Automation of business processes gave sales people access to real-time information on finished goods inventory

• Redundant data entry was eliminated