Case Studies

Manufacturing ERP 

Company
Lamson & Sessions - an electrical manufacturer and distributor, based in Cleveland, Ohio

Business and Technology Problem 
SAP Inventory management application (receiving, shipping and order fulfillment) under SAP R/3 version 3.1 did not allow users to access information using Symbol handheld devices and its Spectrum24 wireless LAN. Only a more recent version of SAP 4.6 provides this support.

Technology Solution
The customer hired a consulting company and developed an interim custom solution that bypasses the middleware but using SAP's console function. Now the factory workers can access his information from their handheld devices in real-time fashion. This increases accuracy of data input as well as its timeliness.

SAP had released SAPConsole, a tool-kit that bar-code-enables any part of SAP's enterprise software.  This allows any SAP graphical interface to text interface. Unfortunately, SAPConsole requires SAP version 4.6 - an expensive upgrade for Lamson & sessions at this stage. Custom software solution cost the company approximately $750,000 to one million dollars.

The customer justified the investment based on improved order fulfillment and fastershipping.