Primex

“Rather than forcing us to design our business around inflexible procedures, SYSPRO allows us to use the tools we find most practical for running our business. In the final analysis, that’s good for the company. It increases our ability to survive and grow in a competitive marketplace.”

– Vickie Heese, Finance Director, Primex Manufacturing

Customer Profile

Headquartered in Langley, British Columbia, where the company maintains a manufacturing facility and two warehouses, Primex Manufacturing specializes in the design, engineering and fabrication of proprietary plastic injection products.

The company has a variety of offerings, including a comprehensive line of HVAC venting solutions, but the enclosures it makes for telecommunications companies such as Telus, Rogers, Bell, and Shaw are its most important product. In addition,
Primex’s business development team works with customers and prospective customers to find solutions to their needs and help them better service their customers. The development team also attempts to predict the plastics products that will be needed in the future.

Established in 1971, Primex works closely with telecom customers to design cabinet-style enclosures that house cable, networking wires and hardware, and provide protection from external factors such as rodents and weather. Vickie Heese, Director of Finance for Primex, says: “Each enclosure design is built specifically to answer the needs of today’s broadband installers. What sets us apart from the competition is our ability to design, customize, and deliver a top-quality product that meets every one of our customers’ enclosure needs, whether it’s for copper wire, modern fiber optics, modems or routers. The versatility of our products helps telecom and cable companies manage the transition to broadband with less cost and with greater flexibility and adaptability for future technologies.”

The Business Challenge

Primex Manufacturing identified a need to share common data across the enterprise, and recognized that an Enterprise Resource Planning solution was the optimal way to expose and consume information from all its mission-critical systems. The company’s requirements called for a flexible, open architecture that would provide the agility to
add, upgrade and swap components.

The Solution

For the past 15 years, Primex has run its operations using SYSPRO software. The SYSPRO modules used by the company include General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Work in Progress, Inventory, Product Configurator, Bill of Materials, Sales Orders and Cash Book. “One of the things we really like about SYSPRO is that it works with the other software we use to run our business.

We find the interoperability of SYSPRO with Microsoft and other software to be very useful, especially when it comes to writing reports,” Heese says.

“SYSPRO’s General Ledger module is really good at capturing the information we need to run the company, and without it we couldn’t do our reporting. However, I prefer to create the reports themselves using Power Pivot, the data analysis tool in Microsoft Excel.”

The Outcome

SYSPRO is instrumental in facilitating the collaboration process between Primex and its client companies. “One of our customers will ask for a solution, and our engineers and designers will create a prototype, after which the company might say ‘Great!’ but ask us to change the design a bit. We work together to perfect the mold, and then we manufacture the product. All of this is made easier by working in the flexible environment provided by SYSPRO,” Heese says. Mark Campbell, Primex’s Senior Manager Inventory and Order Fulfillment, is the primary SYSPRO user in the company outside the financial side of the business. “Like many manufacturing companies, we use a variety of business software applications that need to exchange information,” he says. “We need to connect external devices such as barcode scanners to our ERP, and SYSPRO’s Integration Framework allows us to do all that. It also improves information sharing, reduces duplicate data entry and enables data to be stored in one place for consolidated reporting and analysis.”