BridgeWare Keeps TB Wood’s Running at Full Power

Founded in 1857 as a maker of wood burning stoves, TB Wood’s has since grown into a $100 million designer and manufacturer of electronic and mechanical power transmission equipment for industrial control-with customers around the world. Its widely recognized trademarks include Sure-Flex®, Dura-Flex® and Form-Flex®, which are sold through authorized distributors to end users and OEMs.

This thriving $100 million company designs, manufactures and ships complex components to distributors and OEMs all across the globe using an MRP system on a proprietary platform. Keeping their warehouse and shipping operations in synch with production is serious business-and something that used to siphon off substantial bandwidth, with system resources often at 100%.

By using BridgeWare’s data propagation and synchronization tools, they’ve recognized a twofold increase in efficiency.

TB Wood’s was able to solve that problem by replacing the more cumbersome ODBC middleware with peer to peer Bridgeware replication. “Downloading sales orders into our warehouse management system from our production Man Man environment used to sap nearly 100% of our capacity,” says Bob Bray, Wood’s IT director. “But after implementing BridgeWare CPU utilization is no longer an issue.” By re-writing the sales order interface using Bridgeware, Wood’s financial analyst, Jim English, was able to slash run time from 30 to 45 minutes down to 5 or 10. Plus, he says, “That also freed us to take advantage of various pre-built analytical tools...and generally save time for everyone.”

And using BridgeWare Wood’s is developing something equally impressive-an all-important single view of their diverse multi-plant operations, which to this point has been running with separate “siloed” databases. Separate databases make it very challenging to deliver timely, meaningful reports to the company’s sales and finance departments. Wood’s is presently testing this new environment and expects great results.

“TB Wood’s is the perfect showcase for our solutions,” says Cailean Sherman, president of Taurus Software. “...a flourishing company looking to get better use from their data. We’re elated to be a part of their success story.”

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