Turning the Gears of Success: Red Stick Armature Works Sparks a New Era with Odoo

Location/Region: Gulf Coast, Mississippi River
Industry: Industrial equipment repair
Apps implemented: Discuss, CRM, Sales, Website, Documents, Purchase, Inventory, Link tracker, Manufacturing, Accounting, Quality, Surveys, Employees, Expenses, Maintenance, Email Marketing, Events, Time Off, Subscriptions, Attendances, Barcodes, Dashboards
Software Replaced: Master System
Number of users: 50
Company size: 95
Hosting type: Odoo.sh

Businesses oftentimes emerge out of passion, giving people a way to turn an interest or skill into a lifelong career. But sometimes, a business blooms from a new lease on life. This is Red Stick Armature Works’ story.

Red Stick Armature Works has been a family-owned and operated business since its founding in 1959, and its origins are woven into the fabric of America’s history. Before creating his company, E.C. Howard was a member of the U.S. Navy. On December 7th, 1941, he was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked—and survived. He was transferred to another ship out in the Pacific Ocean when that ship was torpedoed. Miraculously, E.C. survived once again. His perseverance carried him through the war, and after he left the Navy, he decided to go to diesel mechanic school. This decision sparked a passion and love for the craft, and after he left school, he began repairing electric motors out of his house. This is where Red Stick Armature Works was born.

E.C. Howard’s son, Carey, took over the business in the 90s and worked up until Carey’s own son - E.C.’s grandson - Casey Howard took over the reins; he now serves as owner and CEO of the long-standing company. Today, Red Stick Armature Works repairs electric motors and distributes newly manufactured motors. It also has a storage facility that customers can utilize. The company’s typical clients are large industrial companies such as oil refineries, chemical plants, and paper mills. Whether a customer contacts them due to experiencing a break or malfunction in their motor or whether the customer simply is looking for preventative maintenance, Red Stick Armature Works receives motors into its facility and recommissions them.

With 65 years under its belt, Red Stick Armature Works has experienced eras of technological development and business management methods. As the company continues to succeed and strive to grow, it knew it needed a more modern and comprehensive solution to its operational needs. Enter Odoo!

Before implementing Odoo, Red Stick Armature Works had used Master System’s ERP with an industry-specific tack-on since the early 2000s. Jeanne Robinson, the company's CFO, explains that the software was definitely dated, calling it “very clunky and old, but it got the job done.” Specifically, she explains that Master System was not good for reporting or finding needed information. It also had no scanned documents, so the company had to use paper files and journal entries instead.

It was slow and didn't give us the data we wanted. We wanted to be able to look more into our data.

However, the main breaking point came when the software stopped developing the sub-version of it that they were using; Jeanne knew it was a matter of time before they stopped supporting it as well. This realization urged Red Stick Armature Works to reevaluate its use of Master System and evaluate whether it was the best partner to take onto its continued growth journey.

We wanted to grow the business, and we knew this software was not going to cut it. It was just too old; you had to be sitting at a desk in this company to make it work.

Red Stick Armature Works began exploring alternative solutions to Master System, considering options such as Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, and other smaller, industry-specific ERPs along with Odoo. Jeanne explains that they couldn’t even get past the first round of sales calls with these companies - specifically Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite - because they didn’t make Red Stick Armature Works feel that the requirements they were asking for were accomplishable. Jeanne said she questioned whether it was because their company wasn’t “big” enough for their requests to be taken seriously, and instead, found their calls bounced around from salesperson to salesperson with no real, helpful conclusion.

Odoo, she says, stood out for two main reasons. First, Odoo’s software offered the flexibility that Red Stick Armature Works was looking for due to its open-source coding. Second, its price point was attractive and competitive compared to alternatives. These two factors led the company to finally decide on Odoo as the best choice in late 2018, and on January 1st, 2020, Red Stick Armature Works went live with Odoo. 

Jeanne explains that the company’s implementation went very smoothly because she and the team took a full year to get really comfortable using the system, transfer all the data, configure it properly and test it to ensure it was exactly what they wanted. The company also paired up with Odoo Partner System Services Incorporated, which Jeanne says has been a very beneficial experience for them.

Only three months after Red Stick Armature Works’ go-live date, COVID-19 shut down the world. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic had a major effect on the company’s business practices. Jeanne explains that they had to split shifts into two different shifts, and all of their in-office employees switched to working from home. Odoo, she says, made it much easier for the company to implement these changes without major hiccups:

[Adapting to COVID-19’s impact] would not have been possible if we had been on that other software. We wouldn't have been able to do that…It just made it a lot easier to do those changes that we had to do to the company and keep everything flowing.

In a more general sense, Jeanne says that Odoo’s visibility, flexibility, and user-friendliness have been extremely beneficial for Red Stick Armature Works. With Master System, employees had difficulty seeing all aspects of the business. With Odoo, she says that they are now effortlessly able to access data, look back into the company’s history, and easily change pricing models in a way that wasn’t possible before. With this high level of information accessibility, Odoo has improved the company’s bottom line overall.

Odoo has been especially helpful for management-level individuals such as Jeanne. She recalls many times with the company’s old software where, at the end of the month, it would take her hours to work through errors and mistakes made within the system, with her having to painstakingly fix inaccuracies and make everything correct. With Odoo’s setup, she says, if an employee makes a mistake in the system, it can be fixed almost immediately, saving her valuable time and energy.

Accounting and Sales are the Odoo applications that have been particularly useful for Jeanne and her team. Accounting was the module that made the biggest first impression, flowing really well and making the company’s finances much easier to manage. However, Jeanne says that as she uses the database more over the years, she realized that the Sales functionality is the most impactful– looking into the company’s data for what products they’re selling, what the margins on those products are, and applying that information to decision-making in the future.

With 65 years in the industry, Red Stick Armature Works knows how to do business. With Odoo on its side, the family-run company now has deeper insight into and support with its day-to-day operations. Now boasting a more efficient and effective ERP, Red Stick Armature Works can focus solely on the continuing growth and success of the company.

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