Card-Monroe Corporation

Headquartered in Hixson, Tennessee, Card-Monroe Corp. (CMC) is the world's leading manufacturer of custom-built tufting equipment used to manufacture carpet for a variety of flooring markets and applications. This ranges from residential to commercial applications of carpeting, combining a vast array of textures and color options. This includes artificial turf for sports fields and hospitality carpet with sophisticated styles found in hotels, restaurants, corporate offices, and convention centers.

“We are dedicated to excellence in every business aspect,” said Rick Howard, plant manager, Card-Monroe. “Our number of competitors is small, but extremely competitive. We've succeeded by doing things for customers that go well beyond the norm. In addition to usage of technology to improve and manage our business processes, our relationships, experience, and innovation have been key to building operations and products that today supply the vast majority of the total global marketplace in tufted flooring.”

Combining strong manufacturing and inventory procedures with accounting

Card-Monroe took a major step forward when it installed the Epicor enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. After exploring numerous options, Epicor was selected for its strong manufacturing and inventory capabilities, as well as the integrated accounting and built-in system tools (e.g, BAQ, BPM, dashboards).

The Card-Monroe staff has “really settled in and loves using the system on a daily basis.” This is primarily because of the flexibility of seeing data at the same time in multiple modules, while quickly moving through the software to answer customer questions and provide information in real-time.

Creating lean, efficient operations

Another benefit Card-Monroe has found is the ability to set up dashboards that monitor customer orders from entry throughout production and shipping. Dashboards help employees better analyze the status of “hard-to-stock” parts and to carefully gauge priorities on the shop floor. This feature has “enhanced employee collaboration” with better sharing of project details, and has contributed greatly to reducing assembly cycle times by 30% and machine shop work-in-process by 40%.

“Through Epicor, we've tried to make our operations as lean as possible,” explained Howard. “The system has been especially effective for helping to schedule shop orders, manage plant flow, and monitor customer and production demands. Our bill of materials is complicated, and in many cases is 9 to 10 layers deep, so there are many phases and elements in our plant to manage. With Epicor, our team has the tools to manage each
area and to meet very challenging milestones. These are areas where Epicor really excels.”

Importing data without skipping a beat

According to Howard, the Epicor Data Management Tool (DMT) was essential for transporting more than 670,000 records from differing folders and systems into the Epicor ERP (now known as Kinetic) solution. “The data was imported in phases and logical groups without skipping a beat. This included not only our master items such as parts and bills of materials, but also inventory, work-in-process, open purchase orders, and many others-everything essential for our business. Also, this was completed with a very high level of accuracy. Needless to say, it would have taken a tremendous amount of effort on our part to do this manually,” said Howard.

The Epicor DMT was developed to import, update, and delete application data safely and efficiently. Many companies implementing a new ERP system have vast amounts of information to transfer, and to enter this data manually would be far too time-consuming. The tool uses a template builder to help understand the customer entity and establish required fields. The extracted data is then formatted into CSV, Excel, or similar file formats for import into the Epicor ERP system.

“Epicor is ideal for small- to medium-size manufacturing companies like us with mixed-mode manufacturing and small IT support staffs,” added Howard. “Epicor has been so responsive. They have been there throughout the process to help. It's nice working with a customer-centric group like Epicor.”