In 2015, Wilson Sporting Goods bought the Louisville Slugger brand rights from Hillerich & Bradsby, which stills owns the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory and the production facility. Exclusively for Wilson now, Hillerich & Bradsby continues to produce Louisville Slugger bats in Louisville, Kentucky, where the Hillerich family first arrived in 1856. Questions for Discussion 1. What role does information technology play at Hillerich & Bradsby? 2. Discuss "best practices" in IT today.Part Nine Case Louisville Slugger-Hillerich & Bradsby What do Babe Ruth's 60th home run, Joe DiMaggio's $6 game hitting streak, Ted Williams's .306 season. and Hank Aaron's record breaking 71 ng 715th home run have in common? They all were accomplished with Louisville Slugger lueger bats manufactured on the Ohio River at Hillerich & Bradsby The company m my makes about 300 models for Major League Baseball and has about 60 60 percent of the major league market. Best known for its wooden bats, the Louisville, Kentucky-based firm also manufactures a variety of baseball, golf, and hockey equipment amateur and professional athletes The company was founded in 1855 as J.F. Hillerich ierich & Son to manufacture but- ter churns. It entered the baseball market in 1884 when one of Hillerich's sons, Bad, promised Pete "The Gladiator" Browning, a star player, that he could make a bat for him. H&B began producing bats and today relies on the wooden and aluminum bat business for nearly three quarters of annual revenues. The name "Louisville Slugger" was registered in the U.S. Patent Office in 1894. The company remains family-run: John Hillerich IV is the fourth-generation CEO. taking over the private company from his father, He feels the pressure heading a suc- cessful company more than 130 years old, as competition in the industry has intensi- fied as never before. The Louisville Slugger bat now competes with bats made by a host of others. ranging from carpenters to Amish craftsmen. To gain an advantage. H& B looked at its internal system in order to streamline operations. The company needed to address everything from order entry problems to production deficiencies to returns. The overview led to discussion of a new system to handle the flow of information. H.&B had a big decision to make: It could either reconfigure its information system or start over. A new system would need to streamline information flow in support of the sales operation and supply chain management, as well as accounting. finance, and marketing. Management realized it needed a new system to improve its dismal ship- ping record: about 40 percent of its orders were being shipped on time. They opted for the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, designed to simplify all processes by storing all information in one common database and automatically updating the infor- mation in every stage of production. Implementation of a new ERP system usually takes years, and the transition from the old system to the new one is difficult. Since the ERP system uses real-time infor- mation, the production department manufactures only the inventory that the sales department has requested, and the shipping department has the proper amount of inventory to send to customers. The benefits of ERP are bottom-line savings for the company and improved morale as frustration from repetitive tasks and missing infor- mation dissipates. H&B managers thought the cost of implementing the new system was worth the potential savings. Communication between production and sales had been inefficient. as well as that with management. Getting an answer to one simple question could take a week. The first step in streamlining production was to identify problems and devise the needs of the new ERP system. Then, the German company SAP was chosen to pro- vide the software. SAP is a system in which a common server holds all the company's information. Every personal computer (PC) is connected to the server. Once data is entered, it is stored on the server, where everyone can access from a PC. During the 18-month configuration process, morale sagged as longtime employees struggled to change the way they worked. Some employees left during training class. stress levels temporarily increased, and some production processes failed. H&B man- agers thought about halting the new system, but after struggling through implementa- tion, the company began seeing benefits. It took five years to see quantifiable results. Now the company ships 85 percent of its orders complete and on time. compared with 40 percent before SAP. Top customers surveyed rate H&B in the 90-95 percent satisfaction category. 529