Oil States Industries Improves Supply Chain Management and Operational Visibility with Glovia

Glovia International, a subsidiary of Fujitsu and a leading provider of extended ERP solutions for engineer-to-order and high volume manufacturers, announced today that Oil States Industries, Inc. has migrated to the current version of glovia.com. Oil States, a Glovia customer for more than seven years, decided to migrate to take advantage of additional supply chain management functionality which has increased operational visibility and streamlined and standardized system use. Across their multiple locations, Oil States has close to 400 users with nearly 100 logging into the system on a daily basis.

Prior to the migration, Oil States had been running the version of glovia.com that was initially installed. As the company expands internationally, additional functionality, not available in their older version, was needed to continue effective support of their operations. The older version was becoming difficult and time intensive to navigate due to the high volume of customizations that had to be created to keep up with the growing business.

Determining the best way to go about such a major migration was of great importance to Oil States. "One of the most important steps we took in deciding how to proceed with adding additional functionality and streamlining our system, was to work with Glovia to perform a business optimization analysis (BOA)," commented Linda Corbin, Business Systems Analyst for Oil States. "This process enabled us to see exactly where and what we needed to upgrade as well as how to best go about it."

Once Oil States decided to move forward with the migration, their first step was to select team leaders for all aspects of the solution (manufacturing, financials etc.) at each of the locations the new system was being implemented. This was followed by five months of comprehensive training and testing for both users and team leaders to make sure everyone was comfortable with the new system. Oil States began their migration in March 2005 and went live the following August.

"Allotting extra time not only for the migration itself but for extensive testing and preparation was one of the reasons we had a successful migration," continued Corbin.

One of the areas Oil States really focused on with the migration was improving the sometimes-cumbersome navigation of the system. "One of the areas we really wanted to address was the navigation of the system. Reducing the number of customizations has enabled us to move towards a more standardized system and allows us to accomplish tasks faster, better collaborate with other users and have a much easier time training new users," concluded Corbin.