ALPCO Selects AXIOM® to Streamline Aluminum Processing Business

Aluminum Line Products Company (ALPCO) has selected the AXIOM® Enterprise Resource Management System from AXIS Computer Systems Inc. as their next generation business system. ALPCO is a leading supplier to the commercial transportation industry, producing a wide range of aluminum products used in the construction of trailers, containers, truck bodies, refrigerated bodies, and specialty vehicles. AXIOM® is a comprehensive enterprise management system built around the unique operational requirements of the metals, wire and cable industries. AXIOM provides industry-specific support for all key aspects of the business, from sales, production, quality and financial management, to integrated web-based customer service, advanced planning and scheduling, and decision support. ALPCO will initially implement AXIOM/mx Open, the foundation of the AXIOM suite.

Ed Murray, ALPCO CFO states: “Upgrading our information systems is a strategic move for us. We carefully reviewed several major ERP software providers and their products before we made our choice. We picked AXIS for two important reasons: 1) the AXIOM/mx Open software is clearly the best fit for our aluminum processing business, and 2) the AXIS people seem to have a better understanding of our environment than any of the other vendors we talked with. AXIS people ‘speak our language’, and that’s a big factor in choosing a partner for this type of effort.”

ALPCO’s primary reason for implementing a new business system is to improve productivity and customer service, and to reduce operating costs, by better integrating sales, production, and finance around a common base of information maintained with proper controls. “With our current systems, we have to enter the same information into multiple screens and spreadsheets, we have a lot of paper and manually prepared reports, and we cannot get a complete picture of where we stand from any one source.” Says Murray. “AXIOM should reduce the clerical work significantly, but more importantly, it will provide information much faster, and give us far greater visibility.”
Specific capabilities that were important to ALPCO in selecting AXIOM were:

The ability to access inventory by various characteristics at any time during sales, procurement, and production processes.

The ability to automatically capture a thorough genealogy for all products

The ability to automatically post all activity to the general ledger as it occurs and quickly produce financial reports and close accounting periods.

AXIOM will be deployed by ALPCO using SCO UNIX servers and the Progress database.

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