Case Study: Robinson Manufacturing achieves a flexible, web-enabled one-stop ERP and faster vendor collaboration with LANSA

Robinson’s New Erp System Offers a One-stop Shop

Robinson Manufacturing, a long-established U.S. maker and importer of underwear, loungewear and activewear, faced a nearly two-decade-old UNIX/FilePro ERP that was inflexible, hard to maintain and couldn’t be extended to the web—limiting supplier collaboration and slowing internal users. After running warehouse software on IBM i and finding packaged ERP solutions too rigid, Robinson chose to redevelop its core systems in-house on IBM i using Visual LANSA to gain the flexibility and web capability it needed.

Using Visual LANSA, Robinson rebuilt its ERP with a Windows rich-client for staff and a web Vendor Shipment Management System (VSMS) for suppliers to view POs, create shipments, print bar-coded case labels, and generate ASNs; it added QA, reporting, history logs and Excel exports and reused components via LANSA’s repository. The result is a one-stop information environment with greater visibility across the organization, higher user productivity, less IT support overhead and the ability to implement major customer-specific process changes in weeks rather than months.

Robinson Manufacturing

Kathy Griffin

Director of research and development