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For Immediate Release
APICS Recognizes Schutt Sports, Systems Plus,
and MG Industries/SAP America/ILOG
with Corporate Awards of Excellence
Las Vegas, NV (October 8, 2003) APICS—The Educational Society for Resource Management, a professional society headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, presented its annual Corporate Awards of Excellence today to companies that value workplace education, are innovative, and successfully collaborate with technology providers to develop innovative solutions to complex business challenges.
Schutt Sports of Litchfield, Illinois, was the recipient of the APICS Education Award of Excellence; Systems Plus, Inc., of Whitsett, North Carolina, was the recipient of the APICS Innovation Award of Excellence; and MG Industries of Malvern, Pennsylvania, and its partners, SAP America of Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, and ILOG, Inc., of Mountain View, California, are the recipients of the APICS Technology Partnership Award of Excellence. Company representatives received the awards during the 2003 APICS International Conference and Exposition here this week.
Schutt Sports, the education award recipient and one of the last family-owned sporting goods manufacturers in the United States, reaped significant benefits from supporting its employees' pursuit of the APICS certification designation, Certified in Production and Inventory Management (CPIM). Schutt Sports funds the training facility, APICS instructor, and provides all the students' class and study materials. The company pays for the employees' exam fees and has instituted a cash reward system for the exams passed.
"APICS knowledge has turned our organization around, and we are confident that we have gotten a real positive ROI on our APICS training and certification," says Norman M. Halpin, project manager. Before supporting APICS education, the company thought its biggest problem was its MRP II system. "Without the APICS education, we did not know how the system should work and immediately concluded it was broken. We now use our MRP II system more effectively by understanding the reason behind the calculation and along with the ATP, which was never used before, we are confident in our ability to meet customer demand," says Halpin.
The innovation award recipient, Systems Plus, developed On-Time Orders (OTTO), which offers significant benefits to users of traditional ERP, MRP, and MRP II systems by bringing all the order and inventory information together through an approach called reality-based priority management (RPM). "The nice thing about RPM software is that it can be written totally outside the existing ERP system and is therefore immune to system upgrades and version concerns unless there is a change in the database structure. OTTO breathes new life into traditional MRP II and ERP systems and helps companies improve on-time shipment and reduce inventory," says James F. Rittenmeyer of Systems Plus.
By using OTTO, one company increased its on-time shipping of customer orders from 50 percent to between 98.3 percent and 99.5 percent, which is well above the 96 percent goal set by management.
The runner-up for the innovation award is Informatica of Redwood City, California. Informatica designed PowerAnalyzer 4 as an Internet-based and dashboard-driven business intelligence interface that provides real-time alert capabilities for the data integration market.
APICS also recognized the recipients of the technology partnership award—MG Industries with SAP America and ILOG, Inc. MG Industries, a leading North American industrial gas producer, extracts nitrogen, oxygen, and argon from the atmosphere and delivers it to customers near its plant sites in gaseous form by pipeline. Because of the expense of liquefied gas storage, the firm maintains only small amounts of inventory; consequently, production and distribution decisions must be made daily to avoid customer outages.
MG industries sought a technology partner and provider that could deliver solutions to complex production and distribution problems. mySap Supply Chain Management (SAP APO) and ILOG ODF technology were chosen. "We gained the ability to optimize production and distribution planning based on customer demand and coordinated to provide sourcing decisions at the lowest cost to the customer," says Matthew Brown of MG Industries. "The software also provided opportunities to better manage electricity cost, and ILOG ODF provided the framework for building a transportation management solution that incorporated the industry-specific requirements demanded by us.
"Tangible cost savings are being realized and closely monitored, and weekly supply chain plans are being used to meet the customers' needs," says Brown.
The runner-up for the technology partnership award is Tellabs, Inc., of Naperville, Illinois, with its partner Steelwedge, Inc., of Pleasanton, California. With Steelwedge's enterprise demand management approach, Tellabs implemented consensus forecasting that cut forecast cycle times, enabling the planning staff to focus on analysis and planning.
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APICS—The Educational Society for Resource Management provides lifelong learning for lifetime success through its certification programs, training tools, and networking opportunities. The society supports nearly 60,000 members in 20,000 manufacturing and service industries worldwide. To learn more about the APICS community, visit www.apics.org.