Wist Office Products has been serving Arizona businesses since 1955 and is the largest independently owned office supply company in the Southwest. Wist offers over 40,000 products including general office supplies, office furniture and janitorial supplies.  

Wist was running an outdated ERP system that presented a number of problems for the distributor. The first primary concern was the system’s lack of flexibility. The software did not allow the company to implement process improvements, and this in turn required Wist to incur extra, unnecessary labor costs. Secondly, errors were common and prevented Wist from acquiring the information it needed for accurate reporting and data analysis.

Cosma International, a wholly-owned operating unit of Magna International, is a global automotive supplier providing a range of body, chassis and engineering solutions to OEM customers. Unsatisfied with the lack of functionality and support for its legacy business management system, Cosma International's operation in Victor, Iowa, searched for an integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that allowed for real-time shop floor reporting and inventory management.  

Cosma International selected Epicor CMS for discrete manufacturing and has never looked back. "With our legacy system we were reporting all of our inventory transactions at one reporting station," recalls Andy Hrasky, assistant general manager at Cosma International's Victor operation. "It was on the shop floor, so it was somewhat in real-time. That process required a lot of unnecessary, time-consuming movements."

Todd Snover, Advisory Services Supervisor in the Business Process and Systems Group will be presenting at the ASQ-STL Fall Conference on Thursday, November 8, 2018 in UMSL's Millennium Student Center.

His presentation will show how including business process tools in your Quality System will enhance consistency, reduce cost, and promote a ‘process-focused’ culture that embraces continuous improvement. Topics covered will include process classification frameworks, BPMN process mapping, benchmarking, Theory of Constraints, and applications of key Lean Six Sigma tools.

The 2018 Mid-Year Supplement Guides are now available. These guides provide everything you need to know when beginning your software selection and evaluation process.

Developed through a partnership with Industrial Distribution, Industrial Supply, Contractor Supply Magazine and Brown Smith Wallace Advisory Services, these 12-page Supplement Guides provide valuable, independently researched information.