Kwik Lok Corporation

Bag Closure, Labeling and Equipment Manufacturer Improves Business Agility and Customer Responsiveness

Benefits

  • Reduce the number of base products to maintain.
  • Speed up the order creation process with rapidly selected product options and variations.
  • New products are brought to market faster.
  • Streamline BOM generation process with accelerated, dynamic BOM drill down.
  • Improve user adoption by integrating all systems.

“We were immediately impressed at the professionalism of the Experlogix team members and the flexibility that Experlogix CPQ offered as a product.”

Kwik Lok is the world leader in bag closing, coding, and labeling solutions in a variety of industries where reclosability, recyclability and sustainability are desired. Kwik Lok, based in Yakima, Washington, is a multinational company with six world-wide production plants, and 333 employees.

Challenge

Kwik Lok was in the midst of a business transformation with new leadership, new business requirements, and new federal food safety laws being mandated. As a result, a more robust business software system was needed that could provide standardization across all of their manufacturing plants.

Kwik Lok began implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV as their core ERP system, and quickly realized how complex their Item catalog was and the potential of needing to include hundreds of thousands of possible combinations. This would make the system unwieldy for both the sales staff to use and for the IT department to maintain. It would also present a significant hinderance to any future planned e-commerce initiatives that would enable customers place orders online.

“All of this would lead to a very complex item catalog and difficulty for customer service in selecting all the correct options for the customer,” said Paul Gill, Kwik Lok IT Project Manager. “We needed a simpler solution and user interface. We were faced with either building hundreds of thousands of items with only small variations in the catalog, or building just a few hundred generic (or base) items and then using a configurator to build out the details specific to the order.”

Each Lok (bag enclosure) produced can come in a variety of shapes, thicknesses, sizes, colors, opening (the hole in the middle). Kwik Lok’s bag closing machines are produced in a variety of automatic, semi-automatic, and manual versions with different parts or modules to accommodate the various Lok designs. They can also be configured with several models of printers, different electrical systems, and designed to attach to various industry conveyor systems.

“Experlogix CPQ blew away the other two competitors during the demos. And we were immediately impressed at the professionalism of the Experlogix team members and the flexibility that Experlogix CPQ offered.”

Paul Gill, IT Project Manager at Kwik Lok

Solution

Microsoft Dynamics NAV satisfied most of the core ERP functions Kwik Lok was looking for, including the ability to have greater transparency and enhanced reporting of accounting transactions, order processing, product manufacturing, and general productivity metrics. However it could not accommodate all the custom quote and order logic needed with so much variation in their product catalog.

“We saw demos of CPQ systems from 3 different companies. We were immediately impressed at the professionalism of the Experlogix team members and the flexibility that Experlogix CPQ offered as a product,” according to Mr. Gill. “Experlogix CPQ blew away the other two competitors during the demos. Additionally, our IT Staff, who would be tasked with maintaining the system, felt that they could do much more with Experlogix categories, rules, formulas, and many other product features compared to what the other vendors were offering.”

Because the Dynamics NAV implementation was on such an aggressive implementation schedule and the need for a CPQ solution wasn’t part of the initial scope, Kwik Lok had the added constraint to get the CPQ capability up and running quickly. “We were really impressed at the consulting and training provided by the Experlogix staff,” said Mr. Gill. “They responded immediately to our request and worked with us over a two week period to rapidly build out proof of concepts, start building the framework for our configurator, and get us trained at the same time. Once the framework was in place and our IT staff was trained, we were able finish building out the detailed categories and logic on our own, and make it a fully functional system.”

Result

Since going live, Kwik Lok has seen significant time savings in several areas of the business with the combined Experlogix CPQ and Dynamics NAV system. “Today, our sales people are able to quickly and accurately configure the needed options for our customer orders,” said Mr. Gill. “rather than searching through a large catalog with items that are very similar with only small variations. We’re now able to respond faster to customer demand, and ensure the configured products can be manufactured exactly as they were sold.”

“Experlogix gives Kwik Lok the power to create configured orders that look professional and provide an ordering experience for sales that assures they are not making mistakes.”

David Welton, IT Manager at Kwik Lok

“In addition, we’re also saving a lot of time in our ongoing item catalog maintenance by only needing to maintain a few hundred generic (base) items,” said Mr. Gill. “As new product options or variations are added we now only have to add new logic in the Experlogix CPQ Design Center instead of needing to maintain thousands of individual items to the Dynamics NAV catalog. Adding new options or product variations can be done very quickly, since there is no programming, so we can roll out new products faster.”

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