Watch video:
What Tower Products Runs on Datacor
Tower Products manufactures pressroom chemistry, the washes, fountain solutions, and coatings that keep printing presses running and finished products looking right. None of it is inks, but nearly everything else a printer needs comes out of Tower's plants. Running that kind of manufacturing business means the ERP has to be more than a system of record. For Tower, it's the source of truth for essentially everything happening in the company, from the order-to-cash cycle to procure-to-pay.
When a Key Ingredient's Price Spikes 7x
Recent geopolitical events pushed the cost of certain raw materials sharply higher, in one case by roughly seven times. For a manufacturer running dozens of formulations, that kind of spike raises an urgent set of questions: which finished products contain the affected ingredient, at what percentage, whether a substitute exists, and, if not, exactly how much of a surcharge is needed, by product, by SKU, by package, to avoid losing money on every order that ships.
"With the recent geopolitical events, some products that we purchase have become much more expensive. So trying to understand for a given product that's gone up seven x in price, what goods that we manufacture contain this product, at what percentages. Are there substitutes available? If not, what kind of surcharging do we need to think about in order not to lose money on these products."
— Matt McGrath, VP of Transformation, Tower Products
Costing That's Native, Not Bolted On
Answering those exposure questions quickly depends on having accurate costs in the first place. Because Datacor ties receipts of goods, bill-of-materials costs, and customer quoting into the same database, Tower always knows, close to real time, exactly what a product costs to manufacture and what it can quote a customer. That native connection is what makes it possible to trace a price spike through to the finished goods it affects instead of reconstructing the answer by hand.
"Datacor always knows exactly how much it's going to cost to manufacture a product based on kinda up to the minute receipts of goods. What's the bill of materials gonna cost? What price can we quote to customers? All that sort of thing is native. It's built in. It's all part of the same database."
— Matt McGrath, VP of Transformation, Tower Products
A Partnership That Keeps Paying Off
For Tower, the value of Datacor hasn't stayed static. The relationship has led to new solutions added over the past two years that help the team keep pace with a growing company without adding headcount, a return that compounds the longer the partnership runs.
"The Datacor partnership has really been important to us, maximizing the investment we're making. And I think has led to a lot of the new solutions that we're adding last year and this year, which are improving our ability to do our work with the same amount of staff even though the company is growing."
— Matt McGrath, VP of Transformation, Tower Products
