Marion Steel Realizes Breakaway Success with AXIOM® from AXIS Computer Systems Inc.

Marion Steel Company is Number #1 in steel sign support systems. Its breakaway safety posts are a hit. So is an ERP system from Progress Partner AXIS Computer Systems Inc.

Surprisingly, 60% of the steel used in the United States is consumed within a 300-mile radius of Marion, Ohio, an area that includes important manufacturing centers such as Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and manufacturing centers in the southern United States.

Marion Steel Company, a mini-mill based in its eponymous hometown, clearly finds itself in the heart of that important metals market geographically, while also in the industry's forefront technologically. This, thanks to an ERP/MES system from Progress Partner AXIS Computer Systems, Inc., based in Marlborough, Massachusetts.

The pioneer and leader in the development of planning and execution systems for the metals industry, AXIS Computer Systems, Inc. found Marion Steel running a hodge-podge of order entry, inventory, character-based accounting and other business applications, all of them distributed among un-networked PCs. AXIS quickly replaced this fragmented infrastructure with its leading-edge AXIOM/mx Open ERP/MES solution. That platform has finally brought the manufacturer and its information together in a way that is making it a more potent competitor, thanks to greater business efficiency and improved customer service.

AXIOM/mx Open now lets Marion Steel produce and manage in real-time a complete line of Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) approved u-channel sign support and delineation products, including its highly popular breakaway sign supports.

In addition to a complete line of u-channel supports that rank it #1 in steel sign support systems, Marion Steel also produces a range of merchant bar products that include reinforcing bar for bridges and highways, angles, rounds, and flats. Marion Steel also has the distinction of being the leading supplier of rebar to producers of independent mine roof bolt. These forged pieces of rebar secure steel plates to mine roofs to prevent cave-ins.

With its specialized needs and a desire to remain on top of its game, it's no wonder Marion Steel was more than thorough in its search for the right ERP/MES package and very pleased with its final decision.

"It took us three years to find and review the few software packages tailored to the metals industry," says CFO Kathy Ament, of the search to replace its limited legacy accounting package. "After looking at the costs and features offered by the different vendors, AXIS came the closest to what we needed to achieve greater efficiency through real-time tracking of material on the floor, as well as Inventory, Billing, Quality, Financials and Shipping Information applications."

Differentiation Through Better Customer Service

Being in a commodity business means being able to conduct every facet of it without wasted motion, delayed information, and most importantly, without frustrated customers.

To Ament, that meant implementing a system that incorporated product quality and quantity information, something its old accounting package couldn't do. The company also required a system that did much more to improve data collection and processing throughout the company's operations to enhance customer service.

The fact is, says Ament, you can't force-fit a discrete or a process package into a highly specialized environment like metals manufacturing. It has a unique set of processes requiring unique software to support them. AXIOM/mx Open has metals-specific capabilities that 99% of applications don't have, one of the most important being the ability to track products at the bundle-ID level along with their associated heat, chemistry, and quality attributes.

"A key goal was keeping track of production and reporting data so that the sales department always knows what's available," remembers Ament. "AXIOM/mx Open has allowed us to introduce bar coding that assigns a unique ID for each bundle of steel. That helps us track it, assign it to particular trucks and customers, and generate shipping documents, which are the basis for our invoices."

Bar coding, combined with integrated inventory and order entry in the same business application allows Marion Steel to finally collect and work with real-time data. It's a welcome change from the company's previous system of manual data entry. That system required re-keying of data and resulted in delays, not to mention the inevitable mistakes made by human error. Those delays and inaccuracies forced salespeople to work with sometimes incorrect sales and inventory information that was frequently two days old or more. This fact that made answering customer questions about order status and production schedules problematic. The company's increased level of business process integration and automation has also allowed it to reduce what was a 12-person administrative staff by two people.

"So we're gathering all our information in one business system designed for our industry," Ament said enthusiastically. "That allows us to give much more accurate order status information to customers, as well as provide mill test reports that certify each batch of steel's chemical and physical properties.

"It's a very sophisticated and powerful system that's also very flexible and easy to use. It lets us add new data fields for individual products or customers to designate quantities to ship, reserve certain bundles for particular buyers, or add a new trucking carrier or buyer online with no intervention from MIS. I'm also able to generate ad hoc reports much more easily with the Progress tools that were provided with AXIOM/mx Open."

Easy Customization, Development Using AXIS and Progress DB

For companies without the time and money to buy custom applications, buying a packaged solution can sometimes mean extensive modifications of business processes to accommodate the new software. AXIOM/mx Open's features, functionality, industry-specific capabilities and flexibility, however, meant that Marion Steel only had to make relatively minor adjustments to its business practices. Those small changes, in combination with AXIOM/mx Open, are now providing some major conveniences, confirms Marion Steel MIS manager Geof Ridenour.

Ridenour oversees Marion Steel's computer operations that consist of a network of over 50 users on a 10/100 Ethernet network. Those workers sit at desktops running Windows 98 linked to a Novell file server running on an IBM PC server, in addition to a IBM RS/6000 system running the AXIOM/mx Open solution. In all, the networked solution is handling approximately 50,000 transactions a day. Progress v. 8.3a provides the low-maintenance, high-reliability database support that is ideal for the 5-person MIS organization.

"I've worked with databases like Sybase and Oracle, but when budgets and staffing levels are relatively modest, products like AXIOM/mx Open and Progress make it much easier to generate reports using the Progress desktop with Procedure Editor," Ridenour points out. "It's really cool to go into Results and, with the GUI interface, design a report the way you want it. You can easily modify code by exporting it into a file. The ability to get a report up and running and to a user is also very fast. It only takes us a couple of hours to create a new report versus taking all day with other applications like PowerBuilder,"

Marion Steel can also expect to realize significant savings in AXIOM/mx Open's cost of ownership. Because the application is designed to run on the Progress database, that database's 5-year cost of ownership is 21% less expensive than Microsoft SQL and 70% less expensive than Oracle, according to a 1998 Aberdeen Group study.

The AXIOM/mx Open implementation, with its Progress toolset and database, has put Marion Steel ahead of its competitors, says Ridenour, who worked for two other steel companies before coming to Marion Steel. Each of those old line companies was still using homegrown COBOL applications on a mainframe host. Those companies, Ridenour added, also invested millions to upgrade those systems for Y2K. Together, Ridenour points out, they may have spent $10 to $20 million to upgrade their mainframe implementations. The complete AXIS package, in contrast, clocked in at a frugal $400,000 to $500,000.

There may be more economies to come as Marion Steel upgrades its web site from being an effective information repository to one that can conduct business online.

Steeling Itself For eCommerce

Determined to stay on the cutting edge of both technology and customer service, Marion Steel is eagerly anticipating a major initiative into e-Business with AXIOM e/Suite, AXIS' solution for enabling customers to use the web to service customers, suppliers and business partners.

"We hope to have the e-Commerce site up and running by the end of 2000," reports Kathy Ament. "We're looking to get into it in a big way."

That eBusiness capability will include a number of customer service advances such as 24x7 online order status checking as well as the ability to retrieve mill certification information from the web site. AXIOM e/Suite, in fact, will allow customers to get their own quotes, place their own orders, and track production and delivery schedules. Marion Steel also hopes to introduce vendor-managed inventory processes to achieve Just-In-Time efficiencies that will free in-house staff for more strategic tasks.

"We haven't been able yet to put a dollar figure on the savings and efficiencies we've achieved so far with the AXIOM/mx Open solution," says Geof Ridenour. "But, due to online automated data entry and other features, there's definitely much less manual paperwork and the associated human errors. Our customers can attest that the service side of our business has greatly improved as well. If you can eliminate those kinds of costs, you have a system that's well on its way to paying for itself."

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