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Success Story
In a Continual Quest for Perfection, Mikron
Relies on the Muscle of MITS
The Circumstances
Mikron Industries headquartered in Kent, Wash., designs and extrudes
numerous products for the building industry including custom designed
vinyl window and door systems and an engineered composite-MikronWood for
a variety of applications including windows and exterior trims.
Mikron’s IS staff of 15 supports the company’s 1,000+ employees in five
plant locations around the country. The company’s 7x24 operation is
supported by nine UNIX servers running mvEnterprise on AIX.
Using a time-tested business style that has created successful
enterprises worldwide, Mikron follows the principals of Dr. W. Edward
Deming, whose teachings and philosophies focus on excellence—continuous
improvement of product quality and customer service. And in this quest
for quality MITS [Discover] found its niche at Mikron.
Being a Deming-based company means we continuously change things in the
pursuit of perfection” said Steven Christensen, director of IS at
Mikron. The implementation of the Deming philosophy had made an
impression on the company, and had begun to impact Christensen and his
IS staff from the report generation angle. “In the efforts towards
continually improving processes at Mikron, we were doing more OLAP-type
reports in addition to making reports more readable, or sometimes just
changing columns, etc. There were constant, daily requests for ad hoc
reports that used a lot of IS resources.”
The Solution
Before finding MITS, Christensen remembers the frustration typical of
most IS professionals: “An IS staff is not necessarily very good at
writing reports! The process does not ‘stretch’ them much and,
therefore, they have a difficult time keeping focus. Our staff spent
excessive time talking with users, when neither of them really spoke the
same language. It was the classic problem that most companies have.”
Jump forward a few years and Christensen is still proud of Mikron’s
continual quest for excellence, yet touting his contribution to meeting
that goal with less frustration and time spent on the obstacles and
complications that surround customized reports.
“Now that we have MITS as an OLAP and business intelligence tool, we can
focus on a data vision as opposed to a problem vision,” Christensen said
with satisfaction. “MITS is forward-looking and open enough to support
most of the new requirements that our users and customers come up with,
so we can more easily work through requirements that come up.”
The company installed a MITS configuration employing the MitsWeb
component to enable users to access the MITS system with standard web
browsers a few years ago and today depends heavily on its two data cubes
for sales and customer service analysis and information. Lori Withrow, a
sales forecast analyst responsible for the company’s demand planning
function, is one of MITS’ mightiest users and biggest fans at Mikron.
She supports sales, executive management and customers with MITS
information on a daily basis.
“Once I understood the basic MITS capabilities and cubing concepts, it
was quite easy to describe to the programmers where I wanted to go with
it,” Withrow said. “And once the cubes were created, learning and using
the application was absolutely a breeze.”
Christensen said it was also much easier to get approval to purchase
MITS because it has such a rapid return-on-investment. “Most of the
business intelligence tools that perform similar functions to MITS are a
capital expense, outrageously expensive,” he explained. “When they’re
that expensive, they need more infrastructure because you paid so much
for it, and it’s got to look more important. If I’d bought one of those
other tools, I’d have to go to the bank and get a loan. With MITS, I
could just write a check!”
Besides its affordability, Christensen said there were two other
features that sold him on the MITS solution: it is self-managed and
scaleable. “We do next to nothing because once the evening downloads of
data were set up, MITS just runs by itself. And in the future, as our
company continues to grow and MITS isn’t fast enough, I know that it
will scale well. I can just buy more hardware or T1 connections for our
remote sites. These features were important to me.”
The Results
The biggest benefit in using MITS at Mikron, Withrow believes, has been
the speed to market in terms of obtaining information quickly. “I don’t
have to spend my time with programmers and inefficiently utilize the
resources of the IS group just to get out a report,” she said. “MITS
allows me to create my own reports. I love it. I can get what I need,
when I want it, in the layout that I like. Plus, it easily exports to
Excel for other users that need the information for their own report,
charts, or spreadsheets.”
Withrow said she enjoys the increased efficiency that MITS has provided
her as she supports Mikron’s sales force and customer base. “I support
our customers in a variety of ways, either at the executive level,
purchasing, or inventory management. In the past, I’d have to make a
request to utilize IS resources that might involve programming. This
process could sometimes take weeks. With MITS, I can respond to the
customer immediately, and give a higher value back to our customers.”
Christensen agreed that the past scenario described by Withrow could
sometimes be painful. “A report is always needed ‘five minutes ago.’
There wasn’t time to schedule it and plan for it so yes, it could often
take weeks. But when a customer needs information, they need it right
away. Once we started using MITS, that whole gamut of requests simply
disappeared from the IS radar. MITS has really freed up our staff.”
Withrow, who was one of the first Mikron analysts to embrace MITS and
realize its full potential, has become quite adept at manipulating the
data and extracting exactly what is expected from customers and
employees.
“The information required by a customer is quite different from that
required by someone within Mikron,” Withrow said. “A regional sales team
may want volume in terms of dollars, where a customer may want volume in
terms of truckload shipments, or on-time delivery … and all of it is in
different units of measure. The flexibility and detail of MITS is
absolutely important to our overall customer service, especially as
manufacturers within the supply chain move towards on-time delivery and
higher customer service levels.”
Withrow, who said MITS has made everyone that uses it look like a hero
within Mikron, summed up her enthusiasm in simple terms: “I can’t say
enough good things about the product. It simply works. And it works
well.
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Company Profile:
Name:
Micron Industries
Distinction:
Designs and extrudes numerous products for the building industry
Plants:
5 locations in the US
Employees:
over 1000
ERP Software:
Custom
Database:
mvEnterprise
Web Site:
www.mikronvinyl.com
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