How Isolofoam Processes and Tracks Orders Seamlessly with Fidelio Cloud ERP

Published : 06/16/2023

Customer

Isolofoam acquired a competitor — and a new set of challenges.

Despite a near doubling of their workforce in June 2022, Isolofoam’s team couldn’t sustain accurate and timely data entry of EDI orders into their Fidelio ERP. The EDI problem cascaded through the workflow. The manufacturer of innovative thermal insulation materials and customized products for building envelopes soon experienced delays in production and delivery. These delays impacted service to their customers: homebuilding anddesign companies as well as OEMs and retailers in Eastern Canada and the Northeastern United States.

To resolve the bottlenecks, Isolofoam Group called on Stéphane Harvey, CPA, their Director of Finance and IT. We spoke to Harvey about his experience solving these challenges. Our interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

What key challenges was the company facing?

A: We’d been working with a basic form of EDI for several years already, without any significant concerns. Once the EDI order came in, we’d print the report and then manually input the data into our Fidelio ERP.

After our acquisition of a competitor in June 2022, the volume of order data expanded tremendously.
Our team worked hard, but the longer turnaround times for data entry and the increased level of errors due to the rekeying hurt us.

Downstream in our workflow, we had bottlenecks in production and delivery slowdowns. This drop in performance impacted our relationships with customers.

How did you deal with these challenges?

A: We discussed these issues with our previous EDI provider, but the company was not responding satisfactorily to our new needs.

So we called on Fidelio to help us solve the problem. We had been working with Fidelio for about 12 years. They recommended we work with Deblecx. Their specialty is integrating and automating EDI in business processes.

How did the EDI implementation go?

A: The Fidelio team was very helpful. They suggested a practical, low-risk pilot project to test for unexpected issues. We first onboarded one customer, which worked really well due to the great work of your team. So we decided to integrate all our customers.

How did your team respond to the new way of working? What were your goals for the digital transformation?

A: We were already familiar with the processes and language of EDI, so our team required only a little training to adapt to the new system.

What business results did you see after the EDI implementation?

A: We no longer do any manual data entry for orders coming in by EDI. The data is automatically received and processed into an order by Fidelio. And the evolving status of the order is automatically updated by the system. This process change alone saves us five to eight hours a week, not to mention that we greatly reduced the potential for errors through manual data entry. Production and delivery bottlenecks got resolved. Our customers, of course, are much happier, which is huge, and we’ve reduced a lot of unnecessary stress on our team.

When it comes to invoicing, the benefit is really for our customers and partners. We send an invoice through email or the EDI module in Fidelio. They receive the invoice instantly, and if there’s ever any problem, it can be resolved between the parties much more quickly.

What has Fidelio’s customer service been like?

A: The quality and speed of Fidelio’s project management impressed me. This process change alone saves us five to eight hours a week, not to mention that we greatly reduced the potential for errors through manual data entry.

Are you a manufacturer or a distributor? To find out more about the various functionalities and flexibility of the ERP Fidelio system, contact us.