Client background:

A world leader in the manufacture of highly engineered springs, specialty fasteners, machined parts and other precision components for OEMs and after market customers in aerospace, medical, electronics, energy, agriculture/construction, and consumer products/power tools industries. The company has 1,000+ employees in 22 locations, $350M+ in revenues, and serves 23,000 customers in 35 countries.

The business challenge:

• Business acquisitions that were driving additional software needs
• Aging ERP applications and infrastructure at new acquisition sites that were not scalable to the company’s business growth goals
• Lack of process efficiency and standardization across the company’s locations
• Inability to scale for future acquisitions

The Baker Tilly approach:

• Identified the key business drivers and strategic objectives that provided overall direction for the software evaluation process
• Defined a core set of critical and unique business requirements common across three separate locations to evaluate software functional and technical fit
• Recommended a short list of vendors quickly and accelerated the evaluation process through our up-to-the minute knowledge of software vendors, their capabilities and focus industries
• Conducted detailed scripted and day-in-the-life demonstrations with software vendors to confirm level of functional/technical fit and identify solution gaps

The business impact:

• Determined early in evaluation process that the incumbent ERP vendor provided the best fit for the business
• Adapted the project approach, and reduced the project timeline and budget, by accelerating into vendor negotiations and implementation planning
• Developed a detailed Total Cost of Ownership model, including hardware, software and preliminary implementation costs over a 5-year time horizon