Fence Maker Tears Down Walls Holding Data Inside

Published: April 11, 2006

by Alex Woodie

There's an old saying about good neighbors being born of strong fencing. A desire for clear special separation has undoubtedly helped drive sales for Master Halco, the Orange County, California, company that has become one of the largest manufacturers and distributors of security fencing in the world. But when it came to opening up its J.D. Edwards World enterprise software to make it easier for users to accomplish their jobs, Master Halco needed technology to tear down barriers.

Like many OS/400 shops running older ERP products, Master Halco employees wanted a different way to explore financial data stored by World in their secure and reliable DB2/400 database. Instead of requiring IT pros to write queries and ad hoc reports every time somebody in finance needed information out of World, the CFO of Master Halco wanted his workers to use a product they knew well: Microsoft Excel.

"We wanted to find a solution that provided us the capability to do three things," Don King, Master Halco's CFO says. "Number one: Get our critical financial data into Excel without having to go through the cumbersome processes that we historically had in place. Number two: Put the responsibility of financial reporting and analysis in the hands of the financial user. Number three: Take the pressure off of our IT staff from having to contribute to our financial reporting processes in an ad hoc fashion."

The solution that allowed King to tackle all three objectives? Global Software's Spreadsheet Server for J.D. Edwards. Now, the fence maker's workers are no longer separated from their critical financial data, and can get into World data in real-time from the comfort of Excel, thanks to Spreadsheet Server. "We are proud to be Master Halco's vendor of choice in this space," said Spencer Kupferman, vice president of corporate affairs for North Carolina-based Global.