IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems --- IBM i digital edition, January 2009 - 16

JE8ADH: 8JHIDB:G/ Smith & Wesson Corporation =:69FJ6GI:GH/ Springfield, Mass. 7JH>C:HH/ Manufacturing firearms and related accessories =6G9L6G:/ An IBM System i 520 HD;IL6G:/ Quadrant Software IntelliChief, FastFax and Formtastic; and Infor System 21 8=6AA:C DC/ Working with Quadrant Software to create online document images, thereby improving business processes and saving paper, money and time the company patented it, giving Smith & Wesson a lock on that part of the firearms market. Before that patent was due to expire, however, the Smith & Wesson partners went on to design a new and improved version of the revolver, which they called the Model 3 American. This new revolver became the first to use a large-caliber cartridge, setting the company up to become a world leader in handgun manufacturing, with its two largest customers at that time being the United States Cavalry and the Russian Imperial Government. Since then, the company has gone on to many other firearm firsts, including the Magnum Model 29 .44 that Clint Eastwood made famous in the movie “Dirty Harry” and the original stainless-steel revolver, the Model 60. Smith & Wesson now manufactures—some under its Thompson/Center Arms Company brand—a wide range of revolvers, pistols, tactical rif les, hunting rifles, black-powder firearms, handcuffs (or “restraints,” as Marc St. George, Smith & Wesson’s director of IT, calls them) and other firearm-related products and accessories. It uses distributors to offer these products to hunters, sportsmen, competitive shooters, gun enthusiasts and collectors via sporting-goods dealers and some big-box stores. Smith & Wesson sometimes ships directly to the latter, either to retail outlets or distribution centers. The company also has distribution channels for its worldwide law-enforcement and military agency customers. “Distributors are the biggest part of our business,” Gibree says. 2002 (SOX) compliance, Smith & Wesson must keep track of all of its transactions, whether dealing with distributors, direct-to-retailer sales or government contracts. In the past, this meant working with a lot of paper, with 75 percent of orders coming in via fax, 24 percent via e-mail, less than 1 percent via physical mail and one customer using EDI. “Because most of our orders came over as faxes, we had fax machines located throughout the company, which added to the confusion. People would send in orders and we never really knew which machine they came in on, so we’d have to go hunting for them,” Gibree says. Even when orders came in electronically through e-mail or EDI, they were printed for later data entry into Smith & Wesson’s ERP package, Infor System 21, which runs on the company’s IBM System i* 520 server. In some cases, multiple physical copies of some documents, including order-fulfillment packing slips and serial-number lists, were created, with one copy remaining with the company and the other going out with the shipment. For ever y order received, Smith & Wesson generates an order acknowledgement, which it used to mail to the appropriate customer. “We would then run inventory against the acknowledgement and create pick docks, and with every pick docket created, there’s a serial-number copy created against the release of that shipment. Once that shipment’s out the door, we would then generate an invoice on top of the serial-number copy. All this paper would have to be consolidated and filed together for SOX and general legal purposes for x-number of years,” Gibree explains. Complicating things, multiple copies of each invoice would be generated for that day’s shipments. For example, a remit copy would be attached to the original invoice, and a duplicate copy would be filed within the company. During these processes, people would have to manually ensure that the proper documents were matched, collated and filed, a time-consuming and menial task. Hadl^c\I]^c\h9dlc The accounts-payable department used a similar process. Around 95 percent of incoming invoices were received through the mail. Invoices were sorted into five groups based on the first letter of the vendor name and processed by the people responsible for those vendor accounts. Expense reports and check requests were sorted in much the same way. The dispersal of these documents—invoices, expense reports and check requests, for example—to the appropriate personnel took time, and if documents needed approval, yet another person would be involved before they could be returned and processed. In some cases, this meant payments were delayed. “When we were doing approvals in the past, the accountspayable processor would have to make three copies of the 6YYZY8dc[jh^dc Because of these and other business issues, including Federal Firearms License requirements and Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 16 JANUARY 2009 ibmsystemsmag.com

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IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems --- IBM i digital edition, January 2009

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