ITTOOLKIT [ IN PRACTICE ] For more than a century, E.D. Etnyre & Co. and its sister company BearCat Manufacturing have built industrial equipment that helps cities, towns, and other organizations maintain and preserve millions of miles of asphalt roads. You’ll find the companies’ beefy rigs in countries across the globe.
Paving a Road to Business Intelligence
THE CUSTOMER Based in Oregon, Illinois, E.D. Etnyre & Co. manufactures a wide range of maintenance equipment— asphalt spreaders, chip spreaders, storage tanks, and trailers—serving the asphalt road construction industry. The company operates under several brands, including Etnyre and BearCat Manufacturing. THE PROVIDER Tada Cognitive Solutions, based in Peoria, Illinois, simplifies data management with Digital Duplicate technology that connects people, products, and processes to provide collaboration, orchestration, and visibility across the enterprise ecosystem.
other products manufactured by E.D. Etnyre & Co. under several brands, including Etnyre and BearCat, have helped communities in many parts of the world maintain their roads. Since 2020, headcount at the Oregon, Illinois-based company has grown by more than 30%. Etnyre’s equipment has also undergone tremendous advances over the past 124 years, progressing from products like a horse-drawn road sprinkler/oiler to today’s high- tech equipment. For instance, the computerized rate control for asphalt distributors, a capability offered on BearCat machines, boosts accuracy and eliminates operator calculations and adjustments. WE ARE FAMILY Even as Etnyre has grown, it remains a “family-owned and family company,” says Justin Nelson, senior director of information technology. Many employees are among the second or third generations in their families to work at the firm. They’ve accumulated stores of knowledge about the company and its processes.
Yet even as Etnyre’s products continue to incorporate a growing range of technical advances to provide customers with quality road performance and reliability, its order-to-delivery process faced significant roadblocks. The data the company needed to plan for production largely resided within its employee base, as well as in disparate information systems, many of which the company had outgrown. Lacking a single, enterprise-wide repository of information made it difficult for Etnyre to track material costs and other expenses, identify trends, and schedule production to avoid unnecessary costs. To address these challenges, Etnyre turned to Tada Cognitive Solutions. The provider’s digital twin technology offers multiple benefits, including end-to-end visibility across Etnyre’s entire supply chain. It accomplishes this by efficiently connecting internal and external data from multiple systems, enabling Etnyre to quickly access accurate information, enhancing its ability to make informed, effective, and strategic business decisions. Since 1898, the asphalt distributors, pull trailers, spreaders, sealers, and
by Karen Kroll
October 2022 • Inbound Logistics 55
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