The company’s collection of stand-alone marketing, manufacturing,
and marketing ISs with their own data formats and stored in multiple data silos were a constant cause of inefficiency.
Customers’ orders had to be manually entered up to 10 times to
get the data into each IS—wasting time and creating errors. Staff
had to work weeks to compile business reports from data spread
across their non-integrated ISs with various data formats.
Because of inventory blind spots, SunWest held extremely high
levels of inventory to ensure they could fulfill orders.