Cloud ERP Illuminates Northeast Lantern's Manufacturing Processes

Northeast Lantern now has inventory tracking and vision on its production flow on the floor

San Francisco, Calif.Feb. 14, 2014Rootstock Software, a provider of cloud manufacturing and supply chain applications, announced that Northeast Lantern selected Rootstock’s Cloud Manufacturing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to track inventory and have vision on its production flow on the floor. This is especially important as 20 percent of the quality solid brass and copper lanterns the manufacturer outputs is custom, and the company provides a lifetime guarantee.

“We ran all of our reports in Quickbooks,” reported Northeast Lantern Vice President Christopher Heal. “We needed to take the various reports, export them into Excel and formulate a single new report just to find the information we need. Nonetheless, we still didn’t track inventory or have a snapshot of our production flow. Rootstock’s manufacturing ERP now helps us do that, which means our customers can get product faster.”

“To assure they continue to make a quality product and make their manufacturing processes more efficient, a company such as Northeast Lantern requires a scheduling engine that dates work order operation routing steps (which can be sequential or concurrent), and processes them against a comprehensive set of prioritization rules,” explained Pat Garrehy, CEO and founder of Rootstock Software. 

“Northeast Lantern must be able to easily reprioritize work orders visually with drag-and-drop capacity planning screens. They need to quickly locate overloaded work centers or late work orders by color and, then, go to another tab in the capacity planning screens and see all of the shop orders for a particular job.”

“Rootstock’s presentation and ability to fill all of our gaps was met during our initial meeting,” said Heal. “They not only sealed those cracks, but went into detail on other areas that we eventually want to leverage. Going beyond the robust offerings, though, what is especially important to Northeast Lantern is that we now have the ability to migrate our customer base over to salesforce.com and our accounting over to FinancialForce.com with a single switch.

“We originally thought there would be a single module that really stood out,” added Heal. "However, what impressed us is that each Rootstock module spoke to the others without any thinking or button-pushing by us. Going from an elementary system, we are moving to a robust solution that can handle our entire inventory and work orders simultaneously and flawlessly. It is a major benefit to Northeast Lantern that the modules can also effectively communicate with salesforce.com and FinancialForce.com.”

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