Up, up and away

“We had to chase information constantly, not really knowing where the handoffs were. At the same time, we were seeing shelf space at retailers start to decline, because we couldn’t commit to when we were going to be able to ship the goods,” adds Kennedy.

Correcting these mistakes became part of day-to-day business. Emergency airfreight and expedited truck shipments were regular occurrences, chewing up money and staff time.

All these inefficiencies took up a tremendous amount of Spin Master’s resources. Its head office was packed to the rafters with paper, filing cabinets and increasingly frazzled employees. When a staff member was asked to look up information on a specific order, for instance, he or she might lose a morning trying to locate it.

“Staff were working 12 hours a day, and it was all very manual work, non-value-added activity,” Cleaver says. “We could see the frustration, because they could see that they weren’t contributing in an effective way.”

“We found we were very busy, but we weren’t able to accomplish that next step for growth,” adds Kennedy. “It was satisfying, because we were busy, but completely dissatisfying, because we weren’t able to get anywhere.

“People loved us. They loved our product, they loved our creativity, but it wasn’t reflected in our business growth.”

Choosing a catalyst
Amid all this chaos, Spin Master had its sights set on a lofty goal: global expansion. Its products continued to gain popularity, and the company wanted to capitalize on it by expanding in the US, Europe and beyond.

But by 2004, it was glaringly obvious this couldn’t happen without some serious operational change.

“We couldn’t get there from where we were by doing what we were doing. That realization occurred,” Kennedy says. “It culminated in a commitment to spend some money to find a better way to do business.”

After much discussion, the company decided to invest in a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform.

To choose the right ERP vendor, Spin Master started by looking at what its competitors, its customers and leaders in the consumer packaged goods field were using. From there, it developed a list of prerequisites.

A big concern was scalability. The company was fairly large at the time it was evaluating vendors, b
ut it planned to become a lot larger.

“It had to grow with us as we grew, and if we didn’t grow, it had to work really effectively with us as we operated,” Kennedy explains.

Location was another factor. Spin Master wanted a vendor that had presence in Toronto, so that expertise would always be available. At the same time, it needed a supplier with a global scope so that international branches—including those that did not yet exist—could be easily incorporated.