DONT' REPLACE YOUR SHOP MANAGEMENT SYSTEM....INTEGRATE IT!

The Integrated Data Works Story.

It was in the early 1990’s that John Griner President of Griner Engineering Inc. met Randall Embry during a computer consulting assignment Randall was doing for Griner. Randall was there because Griner had information problems. Griner’s different spread sheets and ERP system reports would provide radically conflicting answers. 

Randall’s solution was simple.

(1) Have a data entry method that gets all the company data into one master database.

(2) Draw all the data for your information needs out of the master database. 

Unfortunately the technology didn’t exist in 1990 to turn this simple concept into reality. Today it does!

(From left to right: John Griner, Randall Embry, Dan Hazel)

A little back story: Griner Engineering www.griner.com was founded in 1978 as a one man machine shop doing welding and machining for the aircraft industry. John fell in love with Lotus 123 (now MS Excel) do to the customizability of the product.

In the beginning all of Griner’s sales, estimating, production, and accounting were done using Lotus 123. At the insistence of a newly hired operations manager, Griner purchased its 1^st ERP system in 1986 for $700. A product called “JobBoss”.

During the late 80’s and 90’s Griner Engineering took off as a very fast growing “Hydromat” company. They used 100’s of Excel spread sheets to run their sales, estimating, engineering, scheduling, quality, inventory, and production operations. These spread sheets were necessary to supplement in the missing pieces their ERP system couldn’t provide.

During the late 90’s when Griner rapidly expanded into Mexico and grew to 200 people, it lost control of its ability to manage effectively. Part of this was due to inadequate data systems which provided conflicting answers.* 

Enter Spring of 2005 and Mr Griner set out to “fix” his data systems once & for all. Shortly after announcing his vision, his two remaining IT people quit without notice (without leaving passwords for the systems).  This turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. Mr Griner had to search out for highly experienced IT people with specific skills in particular fields to fix specific problems.

In very short order many chronic problems were uncovered and fixed and the sights were set on developing a Web Based Integrated Data System.

In the new exciting opportunity that lays ahead the rest of this story will become recorded in history.

* It should be noted that during the late 90’s Griner employed 4 full time IT people. In desperation, in 1997, Griner purchased and installed 3 separate ERP systems! Having standardized on an ERP system Griner set about writing custom applications for the next 2 years until all their work was blown out when the selected ERP vendor changed from an Access/ VB net from end to a Delphi Front end. 

For the next 5 years Griner junked the computer management method and set about developing visual systems. The only drawback was that management of the systems and data was highly dependent on the whims of the management team where as it is extremely difficult to change a database driven ERP system.