Manufacturing

EDI Outsourcing helps Clopay save money and allows them to focus on Internal Business

About Clopay

Building Products Division - With four manufacturing facilities and 49 distribution centers across the U.S. and Canada, Clopay is North America’s leading manufacturer of residential garage doors and a leader in the industrial door market.  Bringing more than 40 years of leadership to the garage door industry, Clopay is the only garage door manufacturer to hold the Good Housekeeping Seal.

Plastic Products Division – With three locations in the US, three in Germany, and one in Brazil, Clopay is a global leader in specialty films, extrusion coatings, custom-printing and engineered laminations. The company is widely known for its unique technology developments in the areas of microporous breathable, elastomerics, monolithic, and apertured films and composites. Clopay’s products are used in the hygienic, healthcare, protective apparel, and industrial markets.

Why Clopay chose TIE Commerce for EDI Outsourcing

Industrial door leader Clopay needed a more efficient way of managing their EDI applications. They found the day-to-day operation of an in-house EDI program intensive and expensive. Maintaining updated trading partner EDI versions, training and retaining qualified technical resources, and purchasing EDI software costly and unmanageable. Recognizing these needs, Clopay decided to fully outsource their EDI processes to an experienced partner like TIE Commerce. Clopay also cited TIE's reasonable price, well known reliability, support and confirmation from several satisfied customers as determining factors that made the purchasing decision much easier.

“TIE Commerce has years of experience in supporting the operation of mission-critical electronic commerce  processes in the area of communications and document mapping requirements specified by our customers in the retail and manufacturing industry”, said Carmel Hirth, Director of IT for Clopay.

Clopay needed the implementation to be seamless to their trading partners and worked with TIE Commerce on a detailed project plan with specific expectations from both parties.  Clopay worked with TIE Commerce to set up a reconciliation process to ensure the accuracy of all inbound and outbound transactions. In a very short timeframe, Clopay had outsourced all its EDI translation, mapping development and enhancements, new trading partner set ups, daily reconciliation, error troubleshooting and communications to TIE Commerce.

The EDI Outsourcing TIE Solution

TIE worked very closely with the technical and business teams of Clopay to provide an SAS 70 compliant Outsourced solution utilizing Data center infrastructure provided by SUNGUARD Availability Services®. This solution not only supported the integration of the company’s internal business processes, but more importantly enabled direct connections between the business processes of Clopay and its trading partners. TIE's user interface provided Clopay with an easy-to-use system with any-to-any mapping capabilities that ensured flexibility enough for future integration efforts.

Clopay is fully outsourced using TIE’s eVision™, Messaging Center™, Integrator™ Applications and directConnect communications™  allowing Clopay to enjoy the advantages of true eBusiness through a secure business-to-business gateway. Using this powerful combination gives Clopay the flexibility to rapidly implement new eCommerce processes with their Oracle Applications Suite to increase visibility, efficiency and response to market conditions.

Results

As a result of Outsourcing it’s EDI to TIE Commerce; Clopay has been able to focus on improving and optimizing its internal business applications and has experienced an annual cost savings of over $80,000 in the first year of service.

TIE's powerful translation capabilities have enabled Clopay to effortlessly transact business and manage more than 17000 transactions per month without error. The overall costs for data storage and software execution have been significantly reduced, and the time dedicated to both new trading partner set up and integration formats have been reduced by 75%.

In addition Clopay has “been able to keep the headcount down in our department and while still maintaining system integrity to support our business and meet our trading partner requirements,” Hirth said. “Outsourcing our managed EDI services to TIE has been one of the best business decisions that Clopay could have made.”