Hatco is the largest US manufacturer of fur felt and straw hats for western and formal wear. Hatco was running their business operations on Infor M3, however, they were experiencing some issues that in their production reporting process. They connected with Fortude in early 2021 to resolve some Infor M3 related issues they were facing. Fortude was able to resolve these issues that Hatco had been dealing with for several years in just a span of two months.

Fortude then engaged with the Hatco team to conduct detailed discovery sessions across a two-week period to identify the processes, modifications, integrations and pain points of the existing solution. The discovery sessions revealed several gaps in Hatco’s existing solution. The Fortude team developed a three-phased approach to resolve ongoing issues, upgrade to Infor’s CloudSuite Fashion, and finally perform a solution optimization in the Cloud.

Challenges

• Issues in operation reporting that prevented Hatco from reporting accurate quantities and timings back to Infor M3.
• M3 10.1, an outdated version of M3, was causing significant issues with system performance, system maintenance and security. Hatco was also unable to secure support for this version of M3.
• Several modifications had been made to their Infor M3 solution so this caused concerns for the Cloud migration as it would be hard to move to the Cloud with a modified solution that was tied to several integrations and many output documents.
• As this version of M3 was used for over 10 years, it was quite slow. This performance problem was further compounded by an extremely large
  database and some missing configurations.

Solutions

• Fortude conducted a comprehensive discovery session that covered their entire enterprise tech architecture. As they were initially reluctant to upgrade because of the sheer number of modifications, integrations and output documents that their existing solution had, the discovery helped the customer understand the opportunities and risks that the move to the Cloud would bring.
• Reviewed the modifications made to the Infor M3 and recommended features in the Cloud that could resolve the same pain points. If the required functionality was unavailable in the Cloud, alternative solutions were developed by the Fortude team.
• Helped the customer move from Infor M3 10.1 to Infor CloudSuite Fashion seamlessly.
• Addressed some of the challenges that the customer was facing with solution optimizations.
• Rolled out the electronic data interchange (EDI) integration, as well as integrations with third-party systems such as the HighJump Warehouse Management and NuORDER, a B2B eCommerce platform.

ERP implementation impact

• The Infor CloudSuite Fashion solution will help the customer streamline processes from manufacturing and procurement to sales and finance.
• The comprehensive solution is expected to provide the customer complete visibility of its end-to-end supply chain activities.
• The solution is also expected to help standardize business processes and facilitate access to real-time data for enterprise-wide collaboration and informed decision making.
• As the customer is in the post go-live support period now, once the system stabilizes, the customer is expected to embark on solution optimization projects like automating certain processes and integrations.