Sports Flooring Manufacturer Augments BPCS with Software from TDCI

Published: January 8, 2008

by Alex Woodie

Robbins Sports Surfaces, a manufacturer of maple and synthetic sports flooring based in Cincinnati, Ohio, has signed an agreement with TDCI to license BuyDesign Configurator, a sales tool designed to make it easier for employees to select, configure, and price products, the software company announced last month.

TDCI, which is based in Columbus, Ohio, has two main software products, including the Mac-Pac ERP suite, which runs on the i5/OS platform, and BuyDesign, a suite of tools designed to make it easier to do business with manufacturers.

With BuyDesign Configurator, TDCI aims to allow manufacturers to streamline the ordering and configuration process for customized products. It automates the process of handling product configuration, dimensions, and pricing from both a customer's and a manufacturer's point of view. It also helps reduce order processing time, cost, and errors by ensuring that only valid combinations of features, options, and dimensions are created, quoted, and ordered.

In Robbins' case, the BuyDesign Configurator software will be integrated with its BPCS manufacturing system to help automate the process of ordering the company's highly customizable sports surface products. After a sports floor is configured with BuyDesign, the specs will be passed directly into BPCS to drive production.

Jay Stoehr III, president and CEO of Robbins Sport Surfaces, says there's a lot more to sports floors than there would appear to be at first glance. "Whether it's for a professional basketball arena, an Olympic venue, or a high school gymnasium, a wood or synthetic sports flooring system is more complex than most people realize, with many design options in terms of sub-floor, resiliency components, and other materials that dramatically affect performance characteristics," he says.

Robbins' IT director, Tony Kleier, says BuyDesign was a good fit with its needs and existing setup. "We chose BuyDesign Configurator to streamline our configuration process because it has the flexibility to handle the many variables in our flooring systems, and because it provides an intuitive graphical user interface that can be integrated with our IBM iSeries-based BPCS system," he says.

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