Excel Spreadsheets Are Not Adequate to Manage Large Volume Transactions

Woodstock, VT -- 05/22/2013 -- United Sortation Solutions brings together the best solutions from around the material handling industry and around the world to help tackle the industry’s toughest challenges.

United Sortation Solutions offers design and fabrication of custom automation equipment to move product within a distribution or manufacturing environment. The company focuses on increased productivity, efficiency and the bottom-line of businesses. Teams of experienced engineers work with industry leaders to evaluate their needs and generate plans to use existing technology or evaluate the feasibility of designing a new revolutionary approach.

Since 2003 United Sortation Solutions has designed, prototyped, and manufactured hundreds of unique pieces of material handling equipment. These products are designed to meet specific elevation changes, product diverting, uniform product stacking/unstacking, selective linear product rotation, and sortation induction and receiving locations.

William Spittel, Supply Chain Manager and Jeff Zerr, Director of Engineering for United Sortation Solutions shared how one large three year purchase order from Northrop Grumman Corporation/USPS in 2008 was the moment they realized the system being used was not capable of handling the large number of components and transactions required.

Before MISys United Sortation Solutions used basically an excel spread sheets and an in-house MRP system. Spittel shared, “MISys offered the capability to define the company’s needs to schedule large numbers of items over a long period of time and were able to continue to utilize QuickBooks as part of United Sortation Solutions’ billing needs.”

Charlie Kimbell with MISys shared, “Most of our new customers have experienced growth in their business that makes it difficult for them to keep up with the production scheduling and inventory management. The number of items is certainly a contributing factor towards the overall complexity involved with trying to manage a bigger enterprise. MISys helps them identify what to buy and when to buy it, and then simplifies the process of purchasing and managing those items.”

The reliance on Excel spreadsheets is common
Seventy percent (70%) of MISys customers use a spreadsheet to manage production scheduling and inventory before buying MISys. Kimbell insists, “It is a poor-man’s MRP that can go horribly wrong if it is not managed meticulously. Companies need more safeguards, logic and universal access to their production and inventory management rather than be held hostage to the availability and capability of one person to create and maintain an accurate spreadsheet.”

The cornerstone of MISys is knowing what to buy, and when to buy it; what to build and when to build it. The system eliminates the guesswork involved and gives companies the ability to use a just-in-time inventory purchasing, reducing their investment in inventory by 25-40%.

Since 2008 United Sortation Solutions had MISys installed and were able to start using the software during the same day. The company continued to utilize its capability to compare costs from suppliers, keep track of Supplier Quality performance, and was more proficient in tracking the amounts of inventory that is kept on-hand.

One of the most unexpected improvements United Sortation Solutions experience in using MISys was the ability to create and manage custom reports that enhanced inventory control. Kimbell suggested, “MISys Manufacturing has over 125 standard reports that come with the software to help companies manage their manufacturing. Because MISys Manufacturing works so well for manufacturers in many different industries, there is no way to anticipate all of the reporting requirements in every industry. That is why MISys introduced its custom reporting module, providing a powerful tool that is easy to use so that companies could get the information they need in order to run their business.”