Weyerhaeuser Uses BatchMaster ERP in 11 Plants

Laguna Hills, CA -- (ReleaseWire) -- 11/29/2006 --Weyerhaeuser Corporation is a Fortune 500 company, with 2005 revenues exceeding $20 Billion. Within this very large organization is a water-based flexographic ink business with operations in 11 locations throughout North America, with nearly 100 employees who use BatchMaster Enterprise on any given day. Weyerhaeuser’s business objective is to fulfill all their customer requirements on schedule and at agreed prices, at a profit. With major fluctuations in customer order patterns, these operations have had to maintain sizable safety stocks or had to be prepared to pay premium prices for delivery of short items if they were to meet customer requirements. As the scale of business grew, so did the severity of this problem.

In 1998, Weyerhaeuser staff realized that the manufacturing system then in place, a semi-custom mainframe-based inventory, sales and purchase order management system, was no longer adequate to support their business. They then developed a list of criteria for their new system, which included immediate access to inventories from all ink manufacturing sites within the company (then 6). Further, they specified that inventories should be updated as batches were closed at the various plants, by personnel on the floor rather than later by a separate administrative support group. This would reduce time to update inventories and eliminate confusion and errors in entry. Of course, the product had to be easy to learn and use.

Ink Lab Selects BatchMaster Doug Miller, Lab Manager, first implemented the DOS version of “BatchMaster” 8 years ago, in 1998. BatchMaster DOS met the above stated criteria for real-time inventory control from multiple locations. Beyond that, Doug was excited about BatchMaster’s superior Lab and Formulation, offering Doug and his team substantial improvements in both control and flexibility in formulations over the features of the legacy system and spreadsheets they’d been using to maintain thousands of formulations. Weyerhaeuser pressed ahead with increased reliance upon BatchMaster DOS until 2002, when they moved up to BatchMaster Enterprise. Irene Jordan, the IT Manager supporting these operations, led a small team of inside consultants to work with BatchMaster Software consultants to accomplish this transition. Irene managed the modification or elimination of in-place procedural flows that had their roots in overcoming limitations of previous process automation software so that Weyerhaeuser could take full advantage of BatchMaster Enterprise’s broad range of facilities. Without the limitations imposed by an outdated manufacturing application, these procedures were no longer required.

Weyerhaeuser Purchasing Supports On-Demand Production

Real-time access to updated inventory gives Purchasing staff the ability to avoid critical shortages and reduce the amount of periodic adjustments in inventory for discrepancies between virtual and physical counts. Beyond these improvements, Purchasing staff can now consolidate orders for a more economic order quantity, manage inventory with greater confidence of not compromising production and service capability, and save money, too.

BatchMaster Software, Inc. has provided advanced ERP solutions for over two decades with more than one thousand five hundred installations worldwide. BatchMaster’s customers can be found in every formula or recipe-based business, including food, beverage, cosmetic, personal care, paint, coating, nutraceutical, pharmaceutical, and specialty chemical industries. Flexible, easy to learn and use, and scalable to grow with a process manufacturing business, BatchMaster is the definitive solution for the challenges facing small to midsize process manufacturers. BatchMaster has more than a hundred technical staff members of highly-qualified software professionals.