Access Information Puts Kendall
Packaging on the Path to Greater
Efficiency

Departments were collecting and reporting information independently. This made it difficult for management to identify deficiencies and track progress on a corporate level. Too much effort was wasted defining reports that didn’t support a proactive decision-making process.

Kendall Packaging sought the flexibility and speed of a dynamic information tool. “Our hope was that a business intelligence tool would make data more accessible to the right people and that they could use it to solve problems,” says Schneider. “We could see what was on the reports, but as far as ‘what-ifs,’ people couldn’t really go in to change the report to give them different answers. That was our expectation of a new tool.”

After one demonstration of the ePS Radius Business Intelligence (BI) tool, Kendall Packaging knew it was going to be the solution it needed. “It basically sold itself,” says Schneider. Its user-defined nature and flexibility for manipulation made it a tool that would work for anyone at Kendall. 

Whether someone in production needed to find out how to improve the use of a press, or the CEO needed to analyze sales trends, BI was going to work.

As one of the first users of the BI tool, Schneider knew there was likely going to be a learning curve, as is the case with any software. “BI is very useful right out of the box,” says Schneider. “But, to get the most out of the system, we worked closely with the team at ePS Radius to tailor the solution to the specific needs of our business.”

Any company making an investment in new software should make sure the technology is working well for others as well. Schneider says, “We talked to another ePS Radius user who had implemented BI and they had done a great job at putting things in place and making it a daily tool for their executives. It helped to hear their success story.”

With improved visibility of manufacturing metrics, Kendall has been able to set measurable goals and develop process improvement teams that track progress.

Schneider says, “With the click of a button, we can drill down by work center, product type or customer. We can easily combine these filter criteria to find problem spots and sort through the data to find areas where we should focus more of our efforts.” With BI, Kendall has been able to optimize press speeds, minimize downtime and reduce make-ready times on its presses.

While many companies without Business Intelligence struggle to make information available between departments in a single building, Kendall Packaging has been able to leverage information between each of its three locations. Schneider says, “Being a multi-plant organization, BI definitely helps bring all of our data together. It has increased the visibility of each plant’s performance - we can look at data and make quick decisions because it is all right there in front of us.”

Finally, Schneider admits that while his company counts on an internal resource to set up new BI reports, sometimes a reporting requirement may be outside their expertise. That is when working with a trusted partner like ePS comes in handy.

The BI product experts work on the same team as the ePS Radius ERP experts and their shared knowledge contributes to the strength of the BI tool. “If there are reports we want to create that are too complex for us, we know we can count on ePS to be there to help us get where we need to be. We know the ePS employees well and they are great to work with,” says Schneider.