Steel Warehouse
Steel Warehouse, a renowned industrial steel processing company based in the United States, traded its outdated, home-grown ERP systems for Microsoft Dynamics 365. However, the platform’s out-of-the-box input and document management capabilities were too limited to meet the company’s needs. By partnering with Formpipe, Steel Warehouse was able to take control of its data and documentation to become even more customer-centric.
How Steel Warehouse took control of its data & documentation
Steel Warehouse is a third-generation family-owned industrial steel processing business. Headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, Steel Warehouse has 23 different locations. The company has experienced considerable growth over the last 10 years, opening several new locations in the United States, Brazil and Mexico.
Since its inception over 70 years ago, Steel Warehouse has been led by its mission to put the customer first. Each of the 23 locations has its own speciality, reflecting the company’s customised, customer-focused approach that makes it stand out in the steel industry.
The case for change
Like many businesses, Steel Warehouse had an all-too-common problem: outdated ERP systems. Across 23 sites, the company uses five different ERP systems, two home-grown and written in Cobalt, a programming language.
Not only were Cobalt developers incredibly difficult to find, but they also wouldn’t understand how Steel Warehouse’s home-grown systems worked. This made meaningful updates to their ERP systems impossible. Michelle Spain, Business Systems Analyst at Steel Warehouse, explained how the outdated ERP systems impacted the business: “It wasn’t growing with us. It wasn’t fulfilling our business needs anymore, not efficiently.”
Steel Warehouse’s data and documentation needed a change of scenery: a new, centralised ERP strategy across all 23 locations. The company needed a modern, scalable and secure ERP system to achieve long-term growth across the business.
Finding an expert document management ISV
After its Dynamics 365 implementation, Steel Warehouse required a needs-specific ISV to extend the input and document management capabilities of the ERP platform. With an unwanted software renewal date fast approaching, they were under pressure to find a suitable solution, and that quickly.
Formpipe provided the necessary extensions to enhance Dynamics 365’s input and document management capabilities and support Steel Warehouse’s mission to become even more customer-centric.
“Lasernet is so powerful. I always said it's an input and output management tool, but it’s so much more than that. You can take your documents and make sure that they fit your needs and represent your business.”
Michelle Spain
Early results: Steel Warehouse’s document management transformation
While implementation is ongoing, the industrial steel processing company already feels the benefits. Here’s how Lasernet and Autoform DM are optimising Steel Warehouse’s input and document management processes:
- Simplified invoice and external document management: Steel Warehouse used Autoform DM to ingest over one terabyte of vendor invoices from a legacy archive, as it was essential to retain the information. They can now search documents by vendor account and product type and benefit from header or line-level searches to make sure they can retrieve all the information they need.
- Launched the customer portal: With all legacy documents in Autoform DM, Steel Warehouse can now pull information from the archiving solution into Dynamics 365. This allowed them to create a user-friendly customer portal using Microsoft’s Power App interface where customers can review their account and product documentation.
- Enabled the creation of user-friendly documentation creation and management: Steel Warehouse replaced SSRS with Lasernet, which seamlessly fits into Dynamics 365. With its drag-and-drop interface, Lasernet is easy to navigate for non-technical users, allowing them to create queries, make changes and pull relevant data without extensive technical knowledge.
- Streamlined the labels and barcodes process: Steel Warehouse’s customers and internal business units require customer shipping and product labels, which must be routed to specific printers throughout the plant floor based on a range of metadata.
Using the Lasernet form editor, users can build and edit labels and barcodes with information pulled from Dynamics 365 and route labels to the right printer with the right parameters. - Emailing customers and vendors: Steel Warehouse used the Lasernet Connector inside Dynamics 365 to create rule-based destinations which use the stored contact information and purposes associated with vendors and customers.
Additionally, Lasernet combines shipping and product-specific documentation into a single email, meaning customers don’t have to spend time trawling through several emails to gather the documents they need.
Explaining why Steel Warehouse chose Formpipe to transform its input and document management processes, Spain said: “We landed on Formpipe’s tools because of the Lasernet form editor, as well as Autoform DM. It was the complete package that made so much sense.”
Lessons learned
Every software implementation is a learning experience. Asked about the lessons the company learned during the Microsoft Dynamics 365, Lasernet and Autoform DM implementation process, Spain identified three core lessons:
1. Master data comes first
When preparing to move to Dynamics 365, master data must come first. Without clean, accurate and complete data, you can’t move forward with your ERP.
2. Understand your business, users and processes
Be sure you fully understand your business, users and processes. Avoid assumptions. Instead, learn how each department works and communicates across the company. Find out exactly how they use the existing system and understand the dependencies and trigger points of cross-functional processes.
3. Go beyond surface-level testing
Surface-level testing isn’t enough for a successful implementation. “Day in the life” test cases are crucial to thorough testing—real-life scenarios and circumstances where troubleshooting is required to make sure the system can handle the nuances of operations.
With implementation still ongoing, the Steel Warehouse team is pleased with the results so far. After years of grappling with outdated ERP systems that were not fit for purpose, embracing Dynamics 365 and Formpipe’s solutions has allowed the business to be even more efficient and customer-centric.
Read more about Lasernet and our solutions:
Lasernet for Dynamics 365
Built into Microsoft Dynamics 365, Lasernet replaces the limitations of SSRS with an intuitive interface enabling users to manage their documents in real-time.
Lasernet
Lasernet formats, prints, delivers and archives data from ERP solutions around the globe, making document management simpler and streamlined.
Manufacturing
With its roots derived from Manufacturing, Lasernet has helped organisations of all shapes and sizes to achieve maximum efficiency and productivity in ERP output document management.