Merchants Metals Case Study: H5 for Invoice Intelligence & LeanSwift Mobility Apps for Inventory Streamlining

Merchants Metals Implementation Highlights: H5 for Invoice Intelligence & LeanSwift Mobility Apps for Inventory Streamlining

The Client

Merchants Metals serves thousands of professional fence contractors, architects and quality building material retailers with premium-quality fence product solutions. The company manufactures and distributes dozens of product lines through 35 service centers and 5 manufacturing facilities across North America.

 The LeanSwift Partnership

Merchants Metals first worked with LeanSwift nearly a decade ago during their parent company’s Infor M3 implementation. Merchant Metals has a new parent company today, but their partnership with LeanSwift has endured – a trusted relationship grounded in business knowledge to drive efficiencies and cost savings.

Like almost every manufacturer that’s been around for many decades, Merchant Metals had certain manual processes that weren’t broken – but were far from efficient. Reviews of Merchant Metals’ business processes ripe for automation and digital transformation helped LeanSwift identify two key improvement initiatives:

 Mobility Apps Streamline the Inventory Pipeline

When it came to tracking inventory in each service center, Merchants Metals employees would use a handwritten tag to identify the quantity, item number and item description – and then upload this information to an excel spreadsheet.

Under their previous owner, Merchants Metals’ had experience with digitally scanning inventory and tracking Proof of Delivery, and automatically upload these records. Management and IT departments came together with LeanSwift to figure out the optimal mix of mobility apps to move into a new realm of efficiency and visibility:

LeanSwift’s portfolio of mobility apps gave Merchant Metals a fast-track to tailor and implement:

• The Inventory Counting app
• The Proof of Delivery (POD) app
• The Production Reporting app (implementation still in process)
• The Good Receiving app (implementation just getting underway now)

With the Inventory Counting app, counting inventory across all locations now takes only an afternoon. Under the manual process, this took 16-20 hours over a span of 2-3 days.

H5 Amplifies Invoice Intelligence in Infor M3

Merchant Metals’ Accounts Receivable team wanted to be able to quickly find invoices from a single screen & platform – and found the H5 Platform the ideal complement to retrieve, fetch and push data to and from Infor M3.

The 9 month implementation used SQL and APIs, and went live in February 2016. Today with the H5 platform, the AR team has all of the information they need at their fingertips about a specific account’s credit limits, order and payment history, and invoice details.