G.S. Industries of Bassett Inc.

VIRGINIA BUSINESS

SMALL BUSINESS
SOLUTIONS

G.S. INDUSTRIES OF BASSETT INC.

Bassett

Molded plastic parts

By Leila Marija Ugincius

The Business

G.S. Industries of Bassett Inc. manufactures and sells plastic parts for everything from telecommunications devices to mirror frames. The 84-employee company began in 1969 as a subsidiary of Ohio-based Aeroquip Corp. In 1996, a group of private investors purchased the company from Aeroquip.

The Players

Terry Cundiff, vice president; Starlett Hedrick, inside sales manager; Donna Rorrer, information systems manager, all of G.S. Industries. Michael Levy, a project manager at the A.L. Philpott Manufacturing Center in Martinsville, an extension service for smaller manufacturers.

artwork by Chris OBrion

The Problem

When Aeroquip announced that it would sell its Virginia subsidiary, employees here knew they would soon be cut off from parent company resources that they had come to depend on.

The Background

One of those resources was Aeroquip's management information system -- a mainframe computer to which the Bassett plant was networked. Aeroquip's system performed everything from accounting to calculating costs. Cundiff says the system had become a vital tool.

G.S. Industries needed a system of its own. That may not sound like much of a problem -- after all, there are plenty of software products on the market. But the hitch was that the new owners wanted the new system pronto. They had only two months to purchase, install and enter data into a new system. Rorrer contacted Levy for help.

"This is a joke, right?" Levy wondered. He told Cundiff and Rorrer that it could take six months alone just to find the right program, and another six months to make it operational. But the company just didn't have that much time.

The Solution

With the clock ticking, Levy called in an expert from the Electronic Commerce Resource Center in Northern Virginia. Together, they determined G.S. Industries' needs and system specifications. "It was a real stretch, changing over" to the new product, Levy recalls. "They were asking a lot."

But it had to get done. Luckily, helping companies pick manufacturing software is a common practice at the Philpott Center. With Philpott, the Electronic Commerce Resource Center and G.S. Industries each doing roughly a third of the work, the list of available software products was narrowed down to a handful. G.S. Industries' Cundiff, Hedrick and Rorrer then had to choose the best system.

It wasn't an easy decision, Cundiff says. But after talking with other people who used each system, they were able to narrow it down to the most logical choice. What they chose -- and what has since worked well -- was the Macola software system.

When G.S. Industries began its first month as an independent company, the new management information system was up and running. But without help from the Philpott Center, Cundiff says, they wouldn't have made it in time. Levy says it was fortunate that the company already had personal computers with the wires and cables in place for networking. But that doesn't mean Levy is anxious to take on similar projects. Given the choice, he'd like a little more lead time: "What we did," he says, "was pretty astronomical in a lot of ways."