Customer Solution Profiles
Call us at
800.251.8449
DECRA Roofing Systems
Industry: Steel Roof Manufacturing
About: DECRA Roofing Systems is the US subsidiary of Fletcher Building out of New Zealand. Fletcher is New Zealand’s largest building materials manufacturer and distributor. Early in the company’s inception, they produced an innovative new product, stone chip coated steel roofing panels. This had numerous applications and over the years has been refined and improved to meet the needs of the construction industry.
DECRA is the premier manufacturer and distributor of stone coated steel roofing products in the United States. These highly durable, light and efficient steel tile, shake and shingles are well-known and DECRA has developed many innovative practices in the production of their products. They begin with steel in coil form, slit and cut it to size, and then rollform and press the various products that they manufacture. They then apply a base coat to the products, drop the stone chip on them, spray on an overglaze, and finally bake the product and package the product for distribution to local markets in North American through wholesale distribution centers. DECRA’s headquarters is in Corona, California, and they maintain distribution warehouses in Indianapolis and Dallas.
The situation: With the growth that DECRA has maintained, they knew that contemporary enterprise software was necessary to support each of their departments. Prior to implementing Verticent, data was not integrated, there was very little visibility across locations and information consolidation was an arduous and time consuming process. Certain business areas and processes were decentralized and as a result, access to timely information was difficult or next to impossible. Two key areas for process improvement were in inventory and invoicing. The goal in both of those areas was to allow branch locations to manage the day to day sales processes, but centralize the control of system-wide inventories and invoice generation, and streamline the procurement functions.
DECRA realized that in order for each department to gain access to the right information in real-time, they needed to find and implement an ERP solution focused on the unique needs of steel manufacturing and metal fabrication.
The solution: DECRA implemented Verticent in 2004. The entire implementation took six months and all five of their locations at the time went live together.
Steve Jones, Chief Financial Officer for DECRA comments, “There have been considerable improvements in key processes. For example, our month end processes routinely took the better part of two weeks to complete. Our Accounting Manager would manually consolidate branch numbers and would rely on non-integrated Excel spreadsheets for additional details needed to close our books. Now, we are able to close our month within a matter of hours and can generate consolidated financial statements in roughly the same amount of time. With Verticent, not only is the information more timely and accurate, but the manner in which we are able to report on the information is far more efficient.”
Overall, Jones believes that DECRA has much better information to drive the business. He said that prior to implementing Verticent, the company had general information on sales, inventory, purchasing and quality control, but now with the Verticent solution they have precise details on every aspect of the business and are able to make more informed business decisions as a result.
The success that DECRA has achieved with the Verticent solution shows that companies like DECRA, companies who are managing a dimensional product and who require detailed heat number and lot number genealogy, are able to deploy Verticent and address the unique software capabilities brought on by both of those requirements. In the case of DECRA, they start with a steel coil, press the coils to shape, cut to size and finally coat, bake and package the product for distribution. Managing the attributes of that raw material as it progresses through work in process is vital to DECRA; managing and optimizing that raw material is vital to any metals industry company. According to Jones, “Verticent is the enterprise software that runs the country’s leading stone coated steel roofing company.”
