Case Study – Copps Industries – Data Integration

Copps Industries is a leading supplier of epoxy resins. The Company sells over 500 epoxy products and serves over 400 customers across 27 countries.

Challenge
Copps Industries is a Wisconsin-based formulator of epoxy resins used in a wide range of industrial applications. During the supply chain challenges of 2021-2022, the prices of Copps’ raw material inputs fluctuated widely, frequently, and independently of each other. This made it much harder for Copps to quote jobs at target margin levels, especially since its mix of raw material inputs differs greatly from one customer order to the next. Moving along the production line, these fluctuations greatly complicated job costing and inventory tracking. From an IT systems standpoint, the data required to manage these challenges depended on many disparate systems including vendor portals, emails, spreadsheets, and Copps’ ERP system, Deacom.

Solution
With senior leaders at Copps having to spend several hours each day manually pulling, combining, and analyzing disjointed data, the company turned to SSR in search of a better way. SSR began the project by laying out the business problems, identifying all the necessary data sources, and documenting how each data element is used in managerial decision making. Then, the team created a logical structure, known as a data warehouse, into which these data elements could be imported and organized. Connections to Deacom and other source systems were built so that data could be imported to the warehouse automatically and repetitively. Finally, SSR created an intuitive visual front-end that helps Copps understand how each job needs to be quoted and the cost of each piece of inventory flowing through the operation from procurement to finished goods. All of the technical work was done using off-the-shelf tools from Microsoft, ensuring easy maintenance and updating over time.

Result
As this case demonstrates, a problem that originated in volatility of raw materials quickly became an issue of data management. This was compounded by the fact that the data required for frequent decision making had to come from numerous sources, which led to time-consuming and error-prone manual work. SSR and Copps Industries solved these problems by connecting the source systems to a data warehouse and automating the calculations required to guide decision making. Looking back on the journey, Chris Wood says “Now we can spend much more of our time on selling and serving customers rather than doing spreadsheet work; we sleep better at night knowing that we are quoting at acceptable margins; and we have a good grasp of what is flowing through our facility. I have never rated a project a 10 before, but I feel very comfortable rating this experience as a 9. SSR took the time to understand our actual business problem and worked with us to create a practical solution with great business value.”