Overall Laundry Services, Inc. serves customers in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho with complete rental, lease, and purchase of garments and textiles. The company consists of eight service centers (Bellingham, Everett, Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Corvallis, Spokane, and Tri-Cities), three production facilities, two clean room processing facilities, and a design services department.
Its Everett plant is one of the largest laundry facilities in the United States, cleaning over 100,000 pounds of garments, mats, and towels each day. Each garment is bar coded and scanned during the process and can provide information on how often a garment is washed, how long it has been in service, and how many times it has been mended. Rental items have weekly pick up and delivery with mending and cleaning included.
The problem:
To move the business to the next level, Overall's management team knew it was time to select an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) package to eliminate duplicate data entry and allow better access to information.
The solution:
After ranking 120 ERP packages based on Overall's needs, Navision scored in the top five. Navision's user interface with its drill-down capabilities won and MASI was chosen as the vendor.
"We knew we needed a long-term partnership with a vendor. An ERP package can't be installed and have the vendor go away forever! We judged vendors by how they would fit with our culture. MASI was a good fit and geographically favorable," explained Gary Leaf, Overall's Director of Information Management.
"I've been doing this for 30 years and this implementation went as well as any I've been associated with. Navision lends itself to customization and we've enjoyed on-site programmers for years, so we're used to having software the way we want it," said Gary.
The Navision system handles General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Purchase Orders, and pre-issued Inventory for Overall. This is the first time that Overall has enjoyed having purchasing and pre-issued inventory on the same system. "It is a huge benefit from the customer service standpoint and accuracy of data," said Virginia Bezug, Overall's Manager of Accounting.
They are now able to look at merchandise and cost, and see which customers it went to. It is enabling the sales service center staff to respond quicker to inquiries. Prior to having Navision, the outlying service centers only had access to accounts receivable information. "They are thrilled to get access to more information. It helps them do their jobs better and provides more exceptional customer service," said Virginia who is responsible for Navision training at the eight service centers.
"Navision is an intuitive system," added Andrew (Andy) Ariizumi, Overall's Controller and CFO.
Prior to installing Navision, Overall had a system for purchase orders and another for accounts payable so the invoices needed to be entered again. "We were ending up with inexplicable differences that we couldn't reconcile between the systems. It was nearly impossible to wade through thousands of records to find the errors, so it's a huge benefit to have them both on the same system," said Andy.
Overall maintains their existing route accounting system to handle rental inventory, billing, and the management of accounts. MASI established a data interface between this system and the new Navision system.
"MASI really has a topnotch staff," Andy said. "Our project manager went over and above the call of duty. If we had any issues, MASI was very open to talking about them."
Overall management and staff are enjoying the ease of report writing with Jet Reports. The drill-down capabilities from Excel into Navision make financial reporting easier and intuitive, Gary commented. They are running summary statements for about 80 customers which sorts their orders and lists control breaks giving their customers' accounts payable and garment departments the information they need. It makes it easier for Overall's customers to pay their bills.
Another benefit of the new system is when a customer places an order and the item is not in stock, Navision provides the information on when it will be available, said Andy. Gary said that a future plan is to allow customers to look up their orders on Overall's website. Overall's management team is excited about the possibilities available with Navision and how it will grow with the company. Gary said they also plan to implement Navision's Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
"The driving force behind making this kind of investment is that Navision provides better information to those serving customers and ultimately to the customer," said Virginia.
"It's working!" concluded Andy.