Introduction
Eukalin Corporation is an adhesives manufacturer based on the East Coast. It makes envelope seal gum, case-seal and corrugated adhesives, laminating glues, bottle-labeling adhesives, and hot melt glues. It sells across the U.S. and into Canada, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. In 2022 it was acquired by a German adhesives group founded in the early 1900s, which gave it a global sales reach. It later acquired another company, and it now operates a plant in Allentown, PA, a plant in Clifton, New Jersey, and a newly leased warehouse for distribution and storage.
The company’s growth is exactly why its old systems became a problem. Mike Patterson, VP of Manufacturing Operations, and Tracey Memminger, Manager of Manufacturing Operations, describe a setup that worked when the company was smaller and then stopped working. By their estimate, production output has doubled and possibly tripled. The systems did not keep up:
- Two systems that don’t talk to each other. Eukalin ran an inventory and batching program alongside QuickBooks Desktop, connected by a separate integration tool. The integration required constant manual entry and corrections.
- Inventory that lags reality. A batch could be made all the way through to finished goods, and the system would not deduct the raw materials until someone sat at a desk and posted the batch ticket.
- No lot-level visibility. The inventory program tracked pounds, not lot numbers. The team could say they had eight drums on the floor without knowing which lots they were.
- A patchwork of extra tools. The company added a separate app to track bins and racking, kept inventory spreadsheets in Excel and used Salesforce for sales, with none of them reporting reliably from one source.
The order-to-shipment process shows the cost. Orders arrive by email, are copied into an Excel order sheet and are turned into a production schedule, again in Excel. The team then creates lot numbers, cuts batch tickets, sends them to the floor and fixes consumption data by hand when the tickets come back. Along the way, nobody knows who touched what.
Selection
For years the company had talked about replacing the system. Two things in particular upgraded the discussion:
- A second acquisition. After the company took on another business and its two systems, the existing setup became unmanageable. Production ran in two systems while invoicing came out of one, which pushed one system into negative inventory. Memminger says she spent most of her time working out what had happened, not doing her job.
- Numbers that didn’t match. Leadership cares most about the big numbers, and those weren’t reconciling. When the team had to justify the discrepancies repeatedly, executives saw for themselves that the systems needed an upgrade and the effort involved to keep them going.
You can’t produce in two systems and sell out of one. You’re making one system go negative because it’s selling something it doesn’t have in it.
Mike Patterson
VP of Manufacturing Operations
The search was a combination of Google research, recommendations, and demos, and the team narrowed it to about four candidates two of which were FishBowl and Katana. Several factors set BatchMaster Cloud ERP apart:
- Relevance of the demo. One vendor’s demonstration involved assembling bicycles. Patterson says this told the team nothing about how the software would handle liquids, raw materials, totes, and drums. When they reached BatchMaster, “it was like a light” going on.
- Familiarity. Patterson had used BatchMaster early in his career with the company, roughly 15 years ago, though he did not know it had grown into a full ERP.
- QuickBooks integration. The team needed a solution that integrates seamlessly with QuickBooks while restricting its role to finance. Although an alternative option offered QuickBooks integration, it did not align with this directional approach.
- A unified platform. Compared with the acquired company’s two-part setup (a batching system plus a separate ERP), BatchMaster promised everything in one place.
The business case was not primarily a cost question. Patterson and Memminger describe it as finding what actually fits, and they say the process required real research, meetings, and demos.
Objectives and Benefits
Take inventory out of QuickBooks. Every month-end, Memminger has to compare every inventory item in the two systems and adjust them to match. The legacy program tracks values to nine decimal places and QuickBooks to four, so across a million pounds the discrepancy is hundreds of pounds and sometimes thousands of dollars. Memminger used to have to take a day to go line by line and sort out the differences. Now it takes even longer. They plan to take inventory out of QuickBooks and just use it for payables and receivables.
Phase the finance change. Eukalin is also moving a warehouse and closing a facility, so it chose not to change its accounting system at the same time. QuickBooks stays for now, with a possible move to BatchMaster’s financial module later.
Connect the whole workflow. The team wants orders, scheduling, batching, inventory and customer service in one system, with no re-keying from email to spreadsheet to batching tool.
Give operators more responsibility. The team wants a system that walks production operators through each step and lets them record more data, so they only need a final verification.
Allocate raw materials and see reorder points. Without allocation, purchasing can’t see consumption in time. In one example, purchasing believed 40,000 pounds of a material were on hand, but within two days 37,000 pounds had been used and the floor was reporting they were out. With long lead times and tightening just-in-time buffers, they need to see demand coming.
Reduce errors and manual math. Customer service reps currently work out quantities and look up pricing by hand, which creates room for error and a heavy “four eyes” review. A drum may have been filled to 450 pounds instead of the expected 475 pounds, but customer service wouldn’t know that. With BatchMaster Cloud ERP, they will be able to quickly pull a finished good from the system, sell it to a customer, and trust that the information they’re seeing is accurate, without having to question details like product weight.
Manage parent-company inventory. Containers from Germany spend 6 to 8 weeks at sea. The team now logs each item and lot by hand against spreadsheets from Germany, and a one-drum discrepancy triggers a full report. With BatchMaster they will be able to receive containers against purchase orders and have them go directly into inventory.
Take control of warehousing. The company currently pays a third-party logistics provider to store raw materials and finished goods and handle shipments. Moving this in-house with WMS capabilities will give Eukalin visibility into every movement, such as when a pallet arrived, where it sits, and who took it. The new setup also includes the R&D module. A customer-facing ordering portal is an add-on the team is also considering for later.
“The inventory management system and the WMS are going to be a big comfort and help to us. We’ll be able to handle a separate area, and we can even set up separate production areas in the system, so we know what’s going on at all times. Not having to rely on somebody else to tell me about my inventory will remove so much stress.”
Team members across departments recognize the clear opportunity to upgrade from the current system, eager for tools that better support their daily work. While learning a new platform brings a natural period of adaptation for batch makers and customer service reps, confidence is expected to grow quickly as they experience the software’s intuitive features firsthand.
Patterson’s vision is centered on empowering the team to reach steady-state efficiency, where everyone trusts the operational data, works with seamless clarity, and easily locates inventory without administrative bottlenecks. Establishing this strong digital foundation is key to scaling smoothly, especially with exciting expansion opportunities on the horizon, including a potential Midwest production facility.
