Overview
H.R. Spinner is a produce packaging distributor founded in 1916. Harold Spinner started by selling wooden strips to the fledgling tree fruit industry in Washington state’s Yakima Valley. Boxmaking crews were created to supply assembled wood crates to the apple and pear packers in the area. As the industry grew, Spinner established an office and warehouse in Wenatchee, Washington, in 1926 to serve the northern tree fruit industry in the state. H.R. Spinner now has the largest box machine program in the Pacific Northwest.
Background
After years of struggling to achieve enterprise resource planning (ERP) stability and efficiency with a customized Microsoft Dynamics GP install, H.R. Spinner required a platform that could be molded to meet its unique business requirements and grow with the company. With increased market demand and a growing customer base, transaction volumes that required manual processing were becoming a major bottleneck. Other needs that weren’t being met included proper management of custom units of measure for inventory items, adequate tracking of customers’ purchased inventory, and a highly manual process around drop ship orders. H.R. Spinner wanted a system that will continue to grow and improve with its business, and moving to the cloud was an attractive option.
Project
RSM worked with H.R. Spinner to qualify, purchase and implement NetSuite to meet all major ERP goals. With the help of RSM’s team, H.R. Spinner was able to successfully migrate ERP operations, automate critical manual processes, improve reporting and offload all of the IT headaches of managing the infrastructure. NetSuite’s Financial Management provided automated budgeting, billing schedules, dynamic allocation and more, allowing many of the manual efforts to become eliminated.
“We hesitated to make the leap to the cloud and an ERP platform that wasn’t built specifically for our industry. However, we’re now realizing the advantages that NetSuite delivers in a flexible platform, and RSM was the right partner to help make it work for our unique requirements.” - Adam Miller, Director, Operations, H.R. Spinner Corp.
The Demand Planning module solves its inventory forecast complications by enabling purchasing and inventory managers to determine the demand projection of items months in advance based on historical data and trends of sales information. By creating anticipated inventory, NetSuite delivers the insights that H.R. Spinner’s managers need to plan inventory accordingly, and create purchase and work orders to meet anticipated demand.
Outcomes
H.R. Spinner now has an efficient system that has automated drop shipments and customer-owned inventory. Every inventory item can be assigned its own unit of measure set (i.e., available quantities per pallet) which are then readily displayed on sales and shipping forms. Its contracted price lists are managed separately for each customer, and easily updated as commodity costs change.
With considerably less time spent processing sales transactions and managing customer-owned inventory, H.R. Spinner can focus on doing what they have done best for over a century.
