Customer Story

Steel Warehouse

Steel Warehouse, a renowned industrial steel processing company based in the United States, traded its outdated, home-grown ERP systems for Microsoft Dynamics 365. However, the platform’s out-of-the-box input and document management capabilities were too limited to meet the company’s needs. By partnering with Formpipe, Steel Warehouse was able to take control of its data and documentation to become even more customer-centric.

"Lasernet is so powerful. You can take your documents and make sure that they fit your needs and represent your business."

Industry
Steel Processing, Distribution

Location
South Bend, Indiana, United States

How Steel Warehouse took control of its data & documentation

Steel Warehouse is a third-generation family-owned industrial steel processing business. Headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, Steel Warehouse has 23 different locations. The company has experienced considerable growth over the last 10 years, opening several new locations in the United States, Brazil and Mexico.

Since its inception over 70 years ago, Steel Warehouse has been led by its mission to put the customer first. Each of the 23 locations has its own speciality, reflecting the company’s customised, customer-focused approach that makes it stand out in the steel industry.

The case for change

Like many businesses, Steel Warehouse had an all-too-common problem: outdated ERP systems. Across 23 sites, the company uses five different ERP systems, two home-grown and written in Cobalt, a programming language.

Not only were Cobalt developers incredibly difficult to find, but they also wouldn’t understand how Steel Warehouse’s home-grown systems worked. This made meaningful updates to their ERP systems impossible. Michelle Spain, Business Systems Analyst at Steel Warehouse, explained how the outdated ERP systems impacted the business: “It wasn’t growing with us. It wasn’t fulfilling our business needs anymore, not efficiently.”

Steel Warehouse’s data and documentation needed a change of scenery: a new, centralised ERP strategy across all 23 locations. The company needed a modern, scalable and secure ERP system to achieve long-term growth across the business.

Two factory workers leaning on a metal surface and smiling inside a manufacturing facility.

ERP System Consolidation

Steel Warehouse’s 23 locations used five different ERP systems that weren’t efficient in fulfilling customer and business needs. The company needed a single, cloud-based ERP system that could be expanded to fit new locations, plants and use cases.

Invoice Management

Users manually added supplier and vendor invoices to old document repositories received through different inputs. They needed a system where they could scan and automatically archive invoices into their ERP system.

Document Management & Repository

Due to the lack of a centralised ERP program, the company used multiple document retention systems. Documents were managed in different repositories depending on whether they were internal or external assets, and they couldn’t search for documents across all repositories at once.

Customer Portal

Managing documents in different repositories made it difficult for customers to review their documents, such as invoices, packing slips and mill certificates. The company required a central place where customers could easily access their documents to increase customer satisfaction and save time.

Document Creation & Management

When upgrading the ERP to Dynamics 365, they observed that a more flexible forms editor was required to meet their customer’s specific needs. The company’s customers asked for more customisations in documentation, such as invoices, labels and packing slips.

But that wasn’t the company’s only document creation and management problem. Steel Warehouse stored several versions of the same documents across various repositories, which required excessive maintenance, leading to errors.

Additionally, the legacy label and form designs had outdated appearances at odds with the brand’s image. However, the company needed to be able to create new labels quickly without the help of developers.

To solve these problems, Steel Warehouse needed a master template with flexible branding, giving different business units in different plants the desired form to align with specific account needs. Plus, users needed to have the ability to create and customise labels easily and print the same label to multiple printers as required.

Emailing Customers & Vendors

To send all the relevant documentation in one email, Steel Warehouse employees had to print and scan the documents together, a time-consuming process that wasn’t environmentally friendly.

Steel Warehouse needed a rule-based emailing tool to send the right documentation to the right contacts, combining documents such as packing slips and bills of lading in one email.

Printer Management

The home-grown ERP system made it difficult to manage printers. Adding new ones required costly code changes, hindering their ability to deploy updates quickly. They also wanted a system to enforce consistent printing behaviour and pull data into a centralised ERP system without code changes.

Finding an expert document management ISV

After its Dynamics 365 implementation, Steel Warehouse required a needs-specific ISV to extend the input and document management capabilities of the ERP platform. With an unwanted software renewal date fast approaching, they were under pressure to find a suitable solution, and that quickly.

Formpipe provided the necessary extensions to enhance Dynamics 365’s input and document management capabilities and support Steel Warehouse’s mission to become even more customer-centric.

Early results: Steel Warehouse’s document management transformation

While implementation is ongoing, the industrial steel processing company already feels the benefits. Here’s how Lasernet and Autoform DM are optimising Steel Warehouse’s input and document management processes:

Simplified invoice and external document management: Steel Warehouse used Autoform DM to ingest over one terabyte of vendor invoices from a legacy archive, as it was essential to retain the information. They can now search documents by vendor account and product type and benefit from header or line-level searches to make sure they can retrieve all the information they need.

Launched the customer portal: With all legacy documents in Autoform DM, Steel Warehouse can now pull information from the archiving solution into Dynamics 365. This allowed them to create a user-friendly customer portal using Microsoft’s Power App interface where customers can review their account and product documentation.

Two workers sitting on stacked metal sheets inside a large industrial warehouse.

Group of factory workers in safety gear working with industrial machinery and materials.

Enabled the creation of user-friendly documentation creation and management: Steel Warehouse replaced SSRS with Lasernet, which seamlessly fits into Dynamics 365. With its drag-and-drop interface, Lasernet is easy to navigate for non-technical users, allowing them to create queries, make changes and pull relevant data without extensive technical knowledge.

Streamlined the labels and barcodes process: Steel Warehouse’s customers and internal business units require customer shipping and product labels, which must be routed to specific printers throughout the plant floor based on a range of metadata.

Using the Lasernet form editor, users can build and edit labels and barcodes with information pulled from Dynamics 365 and route labels to the right printer with the right parameters.

Emailing customers and vendors: Steel Warehouse used the Lasernet Connector inside Dynamics 365 to create rule-based destinations which use the stored contact information and purposes associated with vendors and customers.

Additionally, Lasernet combines shipping and product-specific documentation into a single email, meaning customers don’t have to spend time trawling through several emails to gather the documents they need.

Explaining why Steel Warehouse chose Formpipe to transform its input and document management processes, Spain said: "We landed on Formpipe’s tools because of the Lasernet form editor, as well as Autoform DM. It was the complete package that made so much sense."

Smiling man operating a control panel with multiple surveillance screens in a factory.

Lessons learned

Every software implementation is a learning experience. Asked about the lessons the company learned during the Microsoft Dynamics 365, Lasernet and Autoform DM implementation process, Spain identified three core lessons:

1. Master data comes first

When preparing to move to Dynamics 365, master data must come first. Without clean, accurate and complete data, you can’t move forward with your ERP.

2. Understand your business, users and processes

Be sure you fully understand your business, users and processes. Avoid assumptions. Instead, learn how each department works and communicates across the company. Find out exactly how they use the existing system and understand the dependencies and trigger points of cross-functional processes.

3. Go beyond surface-level testing

Surface-level testing isn’t enough for a successful implementation. “Day in the life” test cases are crucial to thorough testing—real-life scenarios and circumstances where troubleshooting is required to make sure the system can handle the nuances of operations.