HELICOPTER SUPPORT, A DIVISION OF SIKORSKY HELICOPTER
We have clients all over the world and suppliers all over the US. Every order is unique and no single off the shelf package came close to meeting our requirements.
Our system ties this all together to give me a complete breakdown of how much we are making on our different sales and what we need to do to do better. Also, our system has allowed our most valuable staff members to operate at a much higher level of efficiency and productivity. Our costs on unnecessary paperwork have gone way down and our sales have increased.
I know that our system is far more sophisticated and powerful than any other business application system that I have ever seen. Based on the comments of the others we have shown it to, both business executives and programmers, it is obvious that this is not just a biased assessment.
The success of the application is largely due to the extraordinary abilities of John Wildanger.
-- Christopher Bogan
Vice President Finance and Administration
Helicopter Support, Inc.
Helicopter Support was the world's largest independent supplier of helicopter parts. They were purchased by Sikorsky which greatly added to their volume of business.
Custom ERP
HSI had been steadily expanding, but the strain of manually tracking its parts sales was becoming too much. They felt they could not further expand without an automation solution.
Unfortunately, their international tax status and wide variety of sourcing methods made COTS ERP packages unworkable.
They had spent a disciplined two years putting together their full requirements before they went looking for a development vendor.
I organized their requirements into system specifications, hired the team to create the ERP and managed its build and go live. The development was done on a tight 9 month schedule on-time and on-budget.
It included a sophisticated class model and data model that reduced development time by 65%.
Once the ERP was live, client’s annual sales increased from $40 million to $80 million in 5 years with only a 30% increase in staff. Client credits the ERP for both the ability to handle the increased sales and for the low staff increase needed.
In the 9 years of its use, client's annual sales reached $200 million.
After 9 years, the client had become large enough to want to develop its replacement in-house. I assisted in that effort.
Client is now a division of Sikorsky Helicopter with annual sales of over $1 billion.