Kolcraft Chooses TLAForms to work with Friedman Frontier for Ease of Use and Savings
Kolcraft is a leading manufacturer of crib mattresses, strollers, travel systems, car seats and a lot more. They use Friedman’s Frontier software for ERP to manage their manufacturing and distribution facilities in California, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Canada and China. While managing their business, Kolcraft generates a lot of forms. When they realized they could make generating forms easier, more cost effective, and easily integrate the forms with their Friedman software with little or no programming, they turned to TLAForms by TL Ashford.
The forms solution Kolcraft initially purchased to work with the Friedman software nearly 20 years ago was not progressing with their needs. The yearly costs were over $3,000 and upgrades were rare. Making changes to forms was difficult and to print forms to different output queues was a “pain.” When Allen Schure, the project lead for forms, learned of the TLAForms software, he scheduled a demonstration of the software with TL Ashford. After a single demo, they purchased TLAForms.
Mr. Schure led the team at Kolcraft to convert their forms using the TLAForms software. The forms included their Bills of Lading, Purchase orders, Shipping Manifests, Invoices, Drop Ship and Standard Packing lists, Acknowledgments and Accounts Payable Checks – the MICR font for check printing is a standard feature of TLAForms. Purchase orders are printed and emailed to their customers, as well as saved to their document imaging center, and converting to TLAForms required no new equipment. The forms print to the same printers – primarily HP M605 and Xerox 7030 printers.
To change the output queue where the form printed using the old software, Mr. Schure would need to change the form for each customer, and this would take an hour or more. “With TLAForms, it took 2 minutes because I just changed the output queue for the form,” said Mr. Schure.
The spool files generated by the Friedman software use codes at the end of each row to accommodate the previous forms package. These codes indicate what type of data is in each row. TLAForms provides a feature for parsing data from the spool file to easily identify these codes and parse the data needed for the new form (see video). For instance, if the spool file row ends with the code ‘06’, TLAForms identifies that row, then selects positions 25 to 50 of the row as the item description. This means no changes had to be made to the spool file to redesign the forms quickly within the TLAForms software.
“TLAForms makes it easy to use unique customer logos on the forms,” said Mr. Schure. Color images are imported into the TLAForms software, and those images can be used on any form. The images can be placed statically on the form, or they can be variable based on data from within the spool file or data from IBM i files to automatically dictate which image appears on the form when the form is generated.
And what about the integration into their Friedman Frontier ERP solution? No programming was required to start generating the forms because when a form is created within TLAForms, the software monitors for new spool files to be generated by the Friedman software. When a new spool file is ready, TLAForms takes the data from within the spool file, applies the data to the form and generates the form based on the output settings of the form.
The previous forms solution was in use for about 19 years paying $3,000 per year in maintenance fees and rarely receiving upgrades. TLAForms costs $2,995.00 initially and yearly maintenance is $695.00, so the investment to convert to TLAForms pays for itself in a year or two, while making generating forms easier and more efficient.