Progressive Technology SAP® Business One Enables Business Progress Integration

“SAP Business One has sped up our processes so much, it’s unbelievable.
And everything is now 100% accurate”
Melissa Holben, Operations Manager, Progressive Technology

There comes a time in a growing company’s life when its business processes and the software that supports them devolve from assets to liabilities. While focusing on more urgent problems of production, delivery, and customer satisfaction, a company may not react immediately, but eventually circumstances will dictate that the situation be addressed. When that time came at Progressive Technology of Calgary, Canada, founder and president Fred Jagert threw up his hands and said, “Do something.” Management responded by implementing the SAP® Business One application. The result: business processes were expeditiously integrated and streamlined.

Jagert founded Progressive in 1991 to deliver coiled tubing technology to the gas industry. Coiled tubing provides all the capabilities that straight pipe offers to oil well drilling operations but has the additional advantage that it can be coiled up on the back of a truck like a hose. Progressive supplies the product worldwide and manufactures it through the company’s subsidiary, New Era Machining.

Problems with Legacy Software

Early on, Progressive automated its business processes with software that was appropriate for the company’s database and financial management requirements. Eventually, however, those solutions became increasingly problematic. Their principal shortcoming was a lack of integration, giving rise to multiple rekeying requirements with every order, and difficulty in finding and managing orders from quotation to delivery.

Every time Progressive’s managers discussed this problem with software vendors, they were told there was nothing on the market to meet their needs and something would have to be custom built for them. Given the high cost of custom development, that solution was out of the question. So the company persisted with the same software until a pivotal meeting in December 2005, when Jagert decided he’d had enough.

“I walked out of that meeting and into my office, and there was a fax on my desk about this program from some company called SAP,” says Melissa Holben, operations manager at Progressive. She still marvels at the synchronicity. “I got a phone call from the vendor, VistaVu Solutions, later that afternoon. I said, ‘Send somebody over.’ A rep came over and presented to me and our shop foreman. Within 15 minutes we were sold. And within 15 minutes of us presenting it to Fred, he agreed.”

“I got a phone call from the vendor, VistaVu Solutions, later that afternoon. I said, ‘Send somebody over.’ A rep came over and presented to me and our shop foreman. Within 15 minutes we were sold. And within 15 minutes of us presenting it to Fred, he agreed”
Melissa Holben, Operations Manager, Progressive Technology

Answered Prayers

Choosing a solution this quickly was almost unheard-of; usually a company will evaluate two or three competing packages before making a purchase decision. For Progressive, however, there was no such hesitation.

“We had some questions, but SAP Business One was essentially the answer to our prayers,” says Holben. “We needed something that was ready to go and supplied by somebody who already understood it. And VistaVu came in and showed us it could do everything we wanted it to do.”

Progressive began scoping the project in early 2006. For training purposes, the company piloted SAP Business One in parallel with its existing software for a few months, and then postponed cutover until its year-end, which fell on August 31. “Most people caught onto it really quickly,” notes Holben. “VistaVu came in and set up a test database and we used it to establish

“. . SAP Business One was essentially the answer to our prayers. We
needed something that was ready to go and supplied by somebody
who already understood it”
Melissa Holben, Operations Manager, Progressive Technology

a comfort level with our staff, so that by the time we went live there was no confusion about how to work with it. SAP Business One really is a very user-friendly application.”

Accelerated Business Processes

Immediately upon implementation, Progressive’s business processes accelerated. Previously, Progressive used a multistep process – quotation, sales order, work order, change orders, delivery, invoice, and accounting transactions. The process required employees to rekey basic information at every step, Progressive now has a single-entry process with information available to each area of the company as needed. “SAP Business One has sped up our processes so much, it’s unbelievable,”
says Holben. “And everything is now

“Whoever takes the call can see exactly what happened to the order, where,
when, why, and how.”
Melissa Holben, Operations Manager, Progressive Technology

100% accurate. There aren’t different prices and there aren’t different spellings. It’s just streamlined everything.” Productivity is greatly enhanced from the implementation. A more surprising result, however, is increased customer satisfaction. Now, when a customer calls to find out about an order, information is at everybody’s fingertips.

“Whoever takes the call can see exactly what happened to the order, where, when, why, and how,” says
Holben. Further, accuracy has improved tremendously. While the old processes could result in lost papers, retyped and misspelled entries, transposed numbers, and other manual errors, with SAP Business One all those possibilities for error simply disappear.

Future Potential

For the future, Holben envisions considerable expansion of the use of SAP Business One functionality. “We haven’t utilized the whole sales opportunities potential with regard to project growth,” she says. “We haven’t used any of the forecasting tools yet. There are a lot of production functionalities we still haven’t explored.” Right now, however, the company is enjoying the success it has already achieved with the SAP Business One implementation.

Return to January Newsletter.