“Using Rootstock ERP, we haven’t had a late shipment in over 4 months!”
Backyard America Implements Rootstock Cloud-Based Manufacturing ERP
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – December 4, 2014 – Rootstock Software®, the leader in cloud manufacturing and supply chain applications, today announced that it is helping Backyard America (Fredericksburg, Va.) track and organize orders in a more efficient, comprehensive manner than its former traditional on-premise ERP ever provided. Backyard America has been named by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest growing private firms in America. The company is the leading manufacturer of outdoor structures, including vinyl, fiberglass and aluminum pergolas in a variety of styles, including custom designed.
“Our former ERP gave us limited flexibility as customizations and modifications were too costly,” explains Andy Sears, Backyard America vice president and COO. “It was slow and cumbersome for our people to use and we couldn’t continue to grow our business with it.
“Having selected Salesforce for our CRM, we wanted a fully functional cloud-based manufacturing ERP solution which integrated with Salesforce,” Sears continues. “We went on the AppExchange by salesforce.com and discovered that Rootstock was the only ERP that would do what we wanted. There were also some features, such as drag and drop scheduling, which caught our eye and we believed that the product would get better and better over time. Additionally, as a job shop, we were very impressed with Rootstock’s MRP, which was comprehensive.”
Rootstock’s Material Requirements Planning (MRP) module now manages Backyard America’s shop floor resources, calendaring and scheduling. It uses the company’s sales order and forecast demands in conjunction with the effective production bill of material and, by reviewing item inventory balances, generates planned supplies in a time phased manner to offset the outstanding demands for end items and sub assemblies.
“Job shops, such as Backyard America, require 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,” explains Pat Garrehy, president and CEO, Rootstock. “Production control managers 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 and field service work for a particular job.”
“The combination of Salesforce with Rootstock is helping us provide increased service to our customers,” adds Sears. “First of all, we are able to track and organize orders much better. And, by integrating the two, we are able to trigger many things automatically, such as emails to our customers explaining that we have received their orders and updates on their project. We are able to communicate with them much more proactively. For instance, we can automatically alert them if we are shipping early. Importantly, using Rootstock ERP, we haven’t had a late shipment in over four months.”
About Backyard America
Backyard America, based in Fredericksburg, Va., leads the industry in manufacturing pergola kits and outdoor structures in aluminum, fiberglass, cellular PVC and vinyl.
Through innovation and expertise, Backyard America has become the exclusive manufacturer of Trex Pergola and Brown Jordan Structures, two premium brands in the outdoor living market. Since 1990, Backyard America has exceeded customer expectations with superior products and excellent service. For more information please visit backyardamerica.com.
