Ontario – Toronto GTA – Richmond Hill
Corporation
www.solarsoft.com
Ontario
Toronto GTA
Richmond Hill
Corporation
active
Solarsoft Business Systems supplies modern enterprise software (ERP) and IT services to manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers in North America, Europe and Asia. Over 2,000 companies rely on Solarsoft to bring clarity and efficiency to their daily operations.
Solarsoft specializes in systems that are optimized for specific industries. From automotive parts to packaging to life sciences, from fresh food to electrical components to builders€™ supplies, Solarsoft designs applications to meet the unique requirements of each industry. Specialisation brings multiple benefits for customers. It makes our systems easy to install and easy to use and it ensures that they can deliver value from day one.
Solarsoft€™s engineers and consultants are experts in the sectors on which they focus. Working with Solarsoft means working with professionals that already understand the language and operations that define an industry. It means engaging a team that is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the detailed innovations essential maintaining success in a competitive sector.
Fully featured, Solarsoft systems provide the key to performance in sales, purchasing, finance, inventory and warehouse management, e-commerce and EDI, supply chain logistics, manufacturing resource planning (MRP) and quality control. Wireless technology, barcode automation and mobile communication options project benefits beyond the back office to the shop floor and out to customers at the point of delivery.
Solarsoft€™s real-time management systems for manufacturing and warehouse operations can be applied across industries and integrated with a wide range of ERP systems. Our Mattec branded manufacturing execution systems (www.mattec.com) are employed in hundreds of manufacturing plants to monitor production and boost operating efficiency. For finished goods, our Warehouse - Logistics Systems bring transparency and control to inventory movements and logistics.
Solarsoft applications are built to modern technology standards and employ a service oriented architecture for ease of integration up and down the supply chain. Our commitment to investment in research and development ensures that each Solarsoft application will continue to deliver value as the demands of business change.
Solarsoft was formed from the combined businesses of CMS Software Inc of Toronto and UK based XKO Software Ltd, which merged in April 2007 and renamed as Solarsoft Business Systems. Other acquisitions by the group include VantagePoint Systems, Inc. of Vancouver and AIM-listed Chelford Group plc. Solarsoft is a privately held company with regional headquarters in Basingstoke, England, Toronto, Canada and Shanghai, China.
Country of Ownership: Canada
Exporting: Yes
Primary Industry (NAICS): 541510 - Computer Systems Design and Related Services
Primary Business Activity: Services
Total Sales ($CDN): $25,000,000 to $49,999,999
Export Sales ($CDN): $25,000,000 to $49,999,999
Number of Employees: 90
Services:
Training
Products:
Enterprise resource planning software
Technology:
Solarsoft is a Microsoft Gold certified partner and an IBM Platinum level partner.
Sector:
Key / Major Clients: Magna International, Textron, Venture Industries, Flex N Gate, MartinREA, Woodbridge Industries, Able Manufacturing, Center Manufacturing, Suncast Corporation, Victor Manufacturing
Success Stories: Solarsoft delivers unprecedented integration and production control for Suncast
Constant change is inherent in today€™s business environment. Whether that change is driven internally or by customers, it relentlessly tests the short-term adaptability and long-term viability of an organization€™s enterprise software. All too often change exposes the software€™s limitations and decision makers are compelled to make a judgement call: To what degree are they willing and able to compromise their company€™s processes in order to work around those limitations?
Ed Booth, director of IT for Suncast Corporation, took a hard look at his company€™s 10-year-old, highly modified legacy ERP system, along with a list of over 500 additional system enhancement requests from his internal user community, and he decided the time had come for a new solution.
Solarsoft enables integration from customer service to shopfloor €œWe could have either continued tackling those outstanding issues one-by-one, constantly enhancing the existing system, or we could identify a solution which inherently handled them,€? says Mr. Booth, who notes that many issues related to enhancing the integration, consolidation and visibility of production scheduling. €œWe€™d reached a point where our system was very difficult to maintain and lacked essential functionality, so we determined it would be much more efficient to switch.€? Suncast, a plastic injection molder serving big-box retailers with extremely tight shipping schedules and heavy EDI requirements, needed an ERP solution that not only boasted out-of-the-box and fully integrated functionality, but one enabling tight EDI integration and a solid interface with the company€™s existing 3rd party demand planning and forecasting
solutions.
€œWhen you have a 3-day turnaround on orders, you better have a high finished goods inventory ready-to-ship, which is why we use specialized demand planning and forecasting applications,€? says Mr. Booth. €œBut once we develop our inventory plan, our ERP application needs to handle the demand side – purchasing, processing orders and scheduling production, for example – dynamically and in real-time.€?
Equally important from Mr. Booth€™s perspective, given a manufacturing environment consisting of over 100 state-of-the-art presses and the need to optimize those assets, was a robust shop floor monitoring system with tight integration between it and the ERP application.
Everything under the Solarsoft umbrella
He found everything he needed with Solarsoft Business Systems, which had recently purchased long-time production and process monitoring system provider, Mattec Corporation. €œWe had two key
systems, ERP and Shop Floor Monitoring, that needed to be replaced, and we got it all - Solarsoft iVP and Mattec ProHelp EPM , plus robust EDI support - under one umbrella. Once we found out that Mattec was already integrated into Solarsoft iVP, the decision was pretty straightforward.€?
According to Mr. Booth, the depth of functionality Solarsoft iVP offered to an injection molder, as well as the technical integrity of the application€™s code and database also influenced Suncast€™s decision. He notes that with the implementation of the combined Solarsoft iVP/Mattec solution, his system enhancement to-do list immediately dropped from 500-plus to zero.
Among the areas most notably impacted by the Solarsoft selection is production planning and scheduling. Throughout virtually every department, Suncast has replaced Excel spreadsheets with Solarsoft iVP€™s White-Board Scheduler, a graphical tool that enables managers to visually evaluate and adjust workload and resource allocation at each work station in order to most efficiently meet
production and delivery goals.
€œWe used to have a lot of spreadsheets – customer service would use one set of data, purchasing another. Nobody was looking at one concise production plan. And like most manufacturers our production plans might last a day before we have to modify it,€? says Mr. Booth. €œThe White-Board Scheduler on Solarsoft iVP integrates customer service and purchasing with production. So if an order comes in via EDI it interfaces directly with Solarsoft iVP, and if that order impacts the production schedule the change is communicated immediately to the shop floor. Purchasing also knows what they need to buy in order to fulfill a production plan. There are no gaps; we€™re not waiting for people to update a spreadsheet.€?
Total macro and micro-levelproduction control
Suncast schedulers also exploit the integration between Solarsoft iVP and Mattec ProHelp EPM , with Solarsoft iVP managing and adjusting the manufacturing workload (work orders and scheduling of work orders) on a macro basis, based on the real-time
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