Enhancing global competitiveness with Visibility ERP

ULVAC Technologies, a Methuen, Massachusetts manufacturer and distributor of high-tech, vacuum-related equipment and a subsidiary of ULVAC Inc. of Japan, had outgrown its previous ERP system. The company needed faster, more flexible internal control to meet Japanese Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and a system it could implement quickly, without years of consulting or a large IT staff.

"We required faster, more flexible, internal control than our previous ERP system offered, brought on by a need to be Japanese Sarbanes-Oxley compliant. We couldn't wait years or spend millions of dollars to fully implement a new ERP system at various locations. For the type of work we do, we needed high function at a low cost."

Dave Sackett, CFO, ULVAC Technologies

ULVAC put a number of ERP providers head to head, including the requirement for the flexibility to create custom user-defined fields to track anything the company wanted, such as a warranty start date. After the competition, ULVAC chose Visibility ERP, implementing it at its U.S. headquarters and for remote users across the country within a year.

Results

• Improved productivity about 25 percent with less effort
• Saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year
• Corporate month-end financial reporting now takes about 5 percent of the time it did before, with real-time revenue and cost tracking down to the work order level
• Eliminated manual currency conversion between yen and dollars for reporting to its Japanese parent company
• Engineers now export data directly from CAD into Visibility ERP instead of keying in every field

"We're working smarter and more productively with Visibility ERP, and this will only continue as its flexibility allows us to streamline more of our business processes."

Dave Sackett, CFO, ULVAC Technologies