Before, purchase orders would be initiated, processed and paid through the individual plants. Each plant used its own coding approach, product number system and so on, and that information would sit there in a silo.

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When you start tying all these systems together, it becomes a chain, and there's always the chance you'll have weak links. What happens, for example, when you rely on an application that feeds the shop floor system the bit of information you're looking for and that application fails?

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We weren't in the position to make the investment needed for a single-instance ERP system. You can always spend $2 or $3 million on software, and sometimes you get the benefit, sometimes you don't. We were looking for a low-cost integration strategy we could reuse for a number of different e-business objectives.

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