Lori Bonn Designs

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Title:

Lori Bonn Designs (www.loribonn.com)

Industry:

Jewelry Design, Manufacture, and distribution

Geography:

Northern California, USA

Company Profile:

Founded in 1991 by Lori Bonn Gallagher, the company sells its designs through specialty retailers, department stores and catalogs. Principal manufacturing is done by silversmiths on Bali and other SE Asian locations. www.loribonn.com

Opportunities:

Lori Bonn Designs (LBD) operates on a DOS mini-ERP system. On top of that are a number of home grown applications and custom integrations. The integration points have made accurate inventory tracking and accounting difficult. LBD hopes to improve the design stage through improved costing visibility, improve internal inventory control, and improve the communication with large customers via stable EDI integration.

Risks:

  • PostgreSQL was chosen for the database platform. At this time, the PostgreSQL port has only recently been announced as stable.
  • EDI is an integration with external system. Although EDI is a standard document platform, the actual usage may vary from customer to customer. Also, external integrations always carry risk
  • Accurate inventory control requires improved ADempiere windows to support rapid bar-code scanning for inventory moves, inventory counts, and shipment creation
  • UOM measure differences between vendors present challenges in costing, since the same stones may be purchased in grams, carats, or pieces.


Implementation Modules:

  • Sales
  • Purchasing
  • Material Management
  • Shipping
  • A/P, A/R, Costing, General Ledger


Special Highlights

  • The Lori Bonn staff works in an environment of full visibility, thus all staff members will represent their own departments in requirements and UAT.
  • The entire Lori Bonn Team works on Macintosh workstations.
  • ADempiere will need to integrate seemlessly via EDI with the QRS Catalog for registering product UPC codes.
  • Four large customers require EDI order integration
  • New screens will be implemented to support improved efficiency in inventory management.


Lessons

Project Log

Scoping & Initial Setup Stage

  • The Lori Bonn project started with an engagement for a 3-day onsite JAD (Joint Application Development) session. This is a time for project resources from Idalica to get to meet the key users, explore the current operations, identify areas of improvement, then plan and scope the project. We found the Lori Bonn team to be dynamic, involved and excited. Nearly everyone had ideas for improvement. They were excited about the prospect of a new ERP.
  • An initial scope was developed including integrated e-commerce. Some of the items were moved to later phases, and other tasks were taken on by Lori Bonn in order to address budgetary requirements.
  • Templates were provided to LBD to accumulate the product, business partner and accounting information. These were rapidly completed by LBD, along with legacy data that does not fit into the standard imports. The import process was begun.
  • Immediately we encountered issues with the imports. Many errors led us to review the data. The data seemed fine, so we tried again, and again, and again. The errors were standard data validation errors, and yet the data appeared fine. We tried the same imports into Oracle, and they ran just fine. Meanwhile, a number of other errors were being reported and fixed in the ADempiere core project. We had come nose to nose with Risk #1. Because we had already eaten too much time on the import process, we made a project decision to abandon PostgreSQL and work in Oracle XE in order to eliminate the risk and attempt to get back on budget.