EAST SYRACUSE, New York – McIntosh Box & Pallet began using PalMate™ Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software a little over 10 years ago. A new feature offered by the PalMate Group has enabled the company to integrate with Microsoft’s popular Power BI software, creating a powerful data analytic tool that is helping McIntosh achieve new levels of efficiency.
McIntosh Box History
Ken McIntosh bought the Thompson Box Company in East Syracuse, New York, and renamed it McIntosh Box & Lumber in 1961. The company got its start manufacturing crates for Carrier, the manufacturer of air conditioning equipment. Ken renamed it McIntosh Box & Pallet in 1970.
The company has grown since then – notably since 2017 – and changed ownership a few times. Today, it is owned by Rich Huftalen with Will Wester as president since 2013. Along with Huftalen and Wester, the company is led by a leadership team comprised of Adam Davis, Dustin Matthews, Emily Discenza and Shane Stockhauser.
Still headquartered in East Syracuse, today McIntosh has 12 locations in five states and 425 employees. It also represents other pallet manufacturers in Canada and throughout the U.S. Seven plants are located throughout New York, including five in the upstate region. Others are located in West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina and New Hampshire, including two CHEP repair plants and two plants dedicated to recycling white wood pallets. The company is also developing a new plant in Maine. Six locations have been added since 2017, and most of the growth has come through acquisitions. The accelerated growth the company has experienced in recent years has been spurred by some new hires, including key employees with previous experience servicing CHEP.
Selecting the Right ERP for Multiple Locations
The company invested in PalMate ERP from the PalMate Group, and implemented it near the end of 2012. Companies use ERP software to manage and integrate the essential parts of their businesses. The platform can integrate all the processes needed to run their companies with a single system, such as sales, purchasing and inventory, finances, planning, human resources and more.
Shane Stockhauser, who is part of the McIntosh leadership team with five others, is director of information technology and operations. He has been employed with McIntosh for 10 years and has done everything from supervising a shift to overseeing a plant and migrating into management of information technology.
The year Stockhauser joined the company was the first year it implemented PalMate ERP. At the time, McIntosh had five locations, and management wanted to move beyond simple bookkeeping to an ERP system that could collect and integrate information from all the plants. “It’s very hard to keep five disparate locations doing similar but different products all meshed together,” observed Stockhauser.
Adam Davis, vice president of McIntosh, led the company into adopting PalMate. “That was kind of my baby at the time,” he recalled. A big reason for choosing PalMate was the fact that the PalMate Group was a subsidiary of Automated Machine Systems (AMS). “We felt more secure going with a software company that had a large entity behind it,” said Davis.
Enterprise Resource Planning software was attractive because of McIntosh’s diverse operations – multiple locations in different regions, supplying different products to various customers, a wide product range that included machine-nailed pallets, custom pallets and crates, and recycled pallets. “It was attractive to get into an ERP system that would help bring us into one place,” said Davis. At the time the company was using 20 Excel spreadsheets to compile data and information. PalMate enabled those to be consolidated in the ERP system. “That was really useful, helping us stay on the same page,” added Davis. “It was big, consolidating all those different spreadsheets.”
Tracking Lumber Inventory and Integrating with Power BI
The company’s use of PalMate, which has numerous optional modules, has grown as McIntosh has grown. Initially, McIntosh used the program to enter sales orders and purchase orders for lumber. One of Stockhauser’s first key projects involving PalMate was tagging lumber, since it is the company’s biggest expense. The purpose was to establish more transparency with regard to lumber inventory: what was in inventory, what it cost, how long it had been held, and so on. The process involved tagging packs of lumber with a barcode label that would help identify them and capture information about them. “It allowed us to take a step toward sawing transparency and Power BI,” recalled Stockhauser. “That was a crucial step for us.” Now, managing lumber inventory with PalMate is “second nature.”
Microsoft Power BI (Business Intelligence) is an interactive data visualization software program. It is a unified, scalable platform that allows businesses to connect to and visualize data in charts and graphs and to utilize the visuals on desktop computers, tablets, and cell phones.
The new Advanced Reporting Module from the PalMate Group includes integration with Power BI. The module enables PalMate ERP users to connect to and visualize data they already have from PalMate. Utilizing data from PalMate, companies can access a series of dashboards on multiple devices to provide real-time information about their operations, giving them the ability to make key decisions based on current data.
Stockhauser explained one benefit of improved lumber inventory using the combined technology of PalMate ERP and its new Advanced Reporting Module integrated with Power BI. If one plant runs out of a particular type of lumber it needs, PalMate can identify if the lumber is in stock at another plant. “It’s made the transparency of where our wood is, who has what, and the price of it so much quicker than years ago,” said Stockhauser. “That’s been extremely helpful for us.”
Being able to tag the lumber inventory and have accurate, accessible information “opened up the crown jewel of the software,” said Stockhauser: improved management and efficiency in sawing operations. When a saw operator brings in a pack of lumber to be cut, he scans the tag on the bundle before beginning, and the individual finished pieces of lumber also are tagged. That helps managers determine if it was the optimal use of that pack of material. “That’s so crucial to our business,” noted Stockhauser. “Making good decisions about using lumber is one of the keys to success. Tagging lumber has allowed us to scale and increase savings.”
The information about sawing jobs is used to coach and correct the operators. It even opened up some friendly competition between plants. Managers make calls each morning based on the previous day’s cut-up operations and production. They look at yield, what could have been done to achieve a better yield, whether different materials should have been used, and other factors.
“It’s giving us a nucleus of information to discuss how we get better on a daily basis and get people talking the same language,” said Stockhauser.
Visualizing Production Success at the Operator Level
The added PalMate model to integrate with Power BI gave McIntosh the capability to visualize data besides just evaluating it in a report. Monitors were mounted at some workstations so the operators could see information related to their production in real time, such as how many board feet per hour are being cut compared to the production goal, yield, and so on. “It just allowed putting the information in the right spot at the right time,” said Stockhauser, so the operator can make adjustments based on the data. The Power BI integration with PalMate also allows the company to visually compare production data from machines in different plants.
The integration of PalMate ERP with Power BI puts the information in visual form “and allows people to talk about it,” said Stockhauser. “The conversation is what matters.”
“You can have all the data in the world,” he added. “If you’re not actually doing anything with it, you might as well stop collecting it. It doesn’t matter.” The PalMate model married to Power BI is “where the rubber meets the road.” The data by itself “is just the foundation behind the conversation.”
PalMate is also used to record sales orders. The date helps to forecast the workload for the coming weeks and is used to determine if the lumber inventory is adequate.
One of the most frequent reports the company issues with PalMate is a sales history report. It can show what products have been shipped in a certain period of time, from what plant to what customer.
A customer recently called and wanted to know their purchase history for the previous 12 months to use in developing their budget for next year: each type of pallet or skid, the quantity, price, and total sales. Stockhauser was able to provide them with the information in a few minutes.
“We are extremely sales-driven,” said Stockhauser. The management team looks at sales numbers for the week for individual plants and overall for the company. “We look at saw lines a lot,” he added, as well as how many board feet were cut on a certain job and what was the yield. They also look at figures for new pallet production and repaired pallets.
McIntosh develops and reviews a profit and loss statement each month. All the costs associated with lumber are already captured by PalMate, and the data is always accurate and current. The data is exported to QuickBooks accounting software for the profit and loss statement.
The company uses other PalMate capabilities related to employees, too, such as capturing when they clock in and out and how long it takes them to complete an order of pallets or crates.
Implementing ERP and Transition Secrets
The PalMate Group’s staff has provided strong service and support, as indicated by Stockhauser. “Their service is outstanding,” he said, and as an example, he cited instances when a McIntosh employee calls PalMate and asks the company to walk them through a process. “They take time to listen to what we need…They’re always flexible to work with us.”
McIntosh experienced some challenges in the transition to the ERP software, but they were not directly tied to PalMate, notably as the company has grown and added more people who are using the program. It needed to upgrade its computer servers, for example, and beef up bandwidth for its Internet service.
Another challenge was employee buy-in. Because the company didn’t have the appropriate servers or bandwidth when it launched PalMate, the software operated slowly. Because of that, employees were reluctant to use it. “You have to make sure you have someone on staff that can tackle those issues and reduce (employee) friction,” said Stockhauser. “It’s already hard enough to get people to change habits,” and if there is added resistance, “it’s almost impossible.” McIntosh is in the process of transitioning to cloud computing, which should speed things up even more, noted Stockhauser.
Managing Multiple SKUs and Product Specs
McIntosh plants together manufacture about 5,000 different pallets, skids, crates and containers. The company seeks out orders for custom pallets and packaging – odd sizes, complicated skids, and so on. Most orders for crates are from customers that are located near a McIntosh plant. The company sells some pallets through brokers, but most of those orders are for standard 48×40 pallets.
“I have no idea how we could handle that and do that without PalMate,” said Stockhauser.
The cut-up equipment and operations vary from plant to plant. “Every plant is really different depending on the customer mix,” said Stockhauser. The plant in Geneva, New York, for example, uses a lot of softwood material, so it is equipped with a package saw for cutting the lumber to length and a few cut-up saws. The Buffalo plant uses a mix of hardwood and softwood material, so it is equipped with a gangsaw, multiple resaws, and a package saw. “It really depends on the plant and the customer mix they’re serving in that plant,” said Stockhauser. The company also operates a small sawmill in Central Square, New York, to supply its plants with lumber and also buys cut stock.
The morning Adam Davis talked with Pallet Enterprise, he had looked at a saw line report with personnel from a plant that was six hours away, talking about the decisions that were made and alternatives for improving efficiency. “We would not have had that conversation if that information had not been in PalMate,” said Davis.
“The more you invest in it, the more you get out of it. You’ve got to decide how much value you get from the effort you put in. We’ve put a lot of effort and time into it, and I think we’ve gotten a lot of value from it.”
Davis’ advice to other companies considering investing in ERP software: “I think go slow and experiment.” McIntosh wound up having to go back and change some things about how it entered data. “If we had gone slower, that would have helped us.” In addition, “It takes work and discipline to get the proper information” into the system, he said, so it can be analyzed and utilized.
The PalMate Group staff has always done a good job of listening to McIntosh personnel and explaining how to use the software. “I’ve always appreciated them,” said Davis. Now, PalMate group has even more resources to service customers. “I think they’ve been a great partner.”
For more information on PalMate, visit www.thePalMategroup.com or call (866) 468-6382.
