Products & Services
Fleetwood Folding Trailers Manufacturers the popular Coleman- brand camping trailers

Company Overview
Fleetwood Folding Trailers produces the Coleman pop-up tent camper, and is number one in the industry currently enjoying an almost 50 percent market share in a field of 14 manufacturers. Fleetwood produces 90 percent of the component parts for their campers in-house from raw materials, which leaves 10 percent of the parts to be outsourced. Fleetwood typically ships over 95
percent of all parts orders within 24 hours of the order being printed in the shipping department.
“Our company has enjoyed great success with using Infor to run our business efficiently, achieving Class A MRPII status in 1988, one and one-half years after implementing Infor to support the MRPII project,” said Dale. “Effective use of Infor, along with purchased or in house developed addons, has allowed our company to grow from sales of a little over 9,700 units in 1990 to almost 22,000 units in 1999, with corresponding dollar sales growth from about $33 million to almost $125 million, while only increasing clerical and management staff by about 12%” Fleetwood also added Warranty Processing to their COM_Net offering at the 2000 Dealers Conference, and it was very well received. Sign ups jumped from the original 80 dealers to almost 140 dealers. Fleetwood continued to enhance their COM_Net offering by adding reporting capabilities using their fax system, Cornerstone Communications Unifier, which allowed Fleetwood to easily send reports to either a dealer’s fax machine or their e-mail address as an attachment. At their recent 2001 Dealers Conference, Fleetwood announced the addition of the new COM_Net add-on, Pick-A-Part. Pick-A-Part provides the ability for dealers to click on hyperlinks in Fleetwood’s parts catalog to add items to a COM_Net order. COM_Net does item availability and part substitution checking for each item, just as if it had been manually keyed.

Fleetwood has also enhanced COM_Net by providing access to their retail registration database, which is almost 100% complete. Fleetwood has integrated the capability to allow dealers to request download files containing retail sales for dealerships to use in mailings and analysis. Fleetwood has also added the ability to download old owner’s manuals directly from its site as PDF files, giving the dealers the ability to provide owners manuals for older trade-in campers at no charge. This addition allows Fleetwood to assist dealers in being more effective in selling their products to customers, and boosting their sales. “Our goal is for 100% of our dealers to use COM_Net as the primary method for parts and accessories ordering, as well as Warranty and sales support,” said
Dale. Fleetwood also now offers a shipment confirmation, generated out of a User Exit in both the standard COM billing process and the new OFFSHIP process. The dealer gets an automatically generated fax sent to them showing the COM order number, the customer purchase order number, and all items on the order, showing if the items were shipped or backordered. This document is sent either to the customer’s fax machine or their e-mail address, and provides a very high level of customer information. Dealers are also automatically informed as soon as the shipment is processed through Infor. “This has been very well received by our dealers,” said Dale Gindlesperger.

The Situation
Since mid 1991, Fleetwood Folding Trailers had been enjoying steady growth in their business. However, the success was causing new difficulties. Each year since 1991, sales increased, growing from a little over 9,700 units per year, to four consecutive years of over 20,000 units sold. Practically all of these units remain in use. This caused Fleetwood’s support requirements in the Customer Service department to increase steadily. It became obvious that the “valueadd” for the group was technical support, not order taking. In addition, time spent taking parts and accessory orders and checking on order status for dealers was time not being spent handling technical support. As Fleetwood’s business grew and the number of trailers increased, the number of parts and accessories they shipped increased proportionally. Fleetwood discovered that their shipping department was becoming overwhelmed, requiring excessive overtime to keep up with shipping demand. In late calendar year 2000, Fleetwood added a new product line, the Coleman Caravan. The product is completely dissimilar to the pop-up tent camper, and has a higher percentage of outsourced parts, about 40 percent versus the 10 percent for the pop-up tent camper. In addition, the Coleman Caravan is a customizable product, which means a “make-to-order” environment rather than the “make-to- stock” environment Fleetwood was used to.

The Solution
The answer was obvious—give dealers the ability to enter orders into Infor Customer Order Management themselves, along with the ability to check on order status. Fleetwood purchased Infor COM_Net in late 1998, installed it and began testing to see how it could best be implemented for the business. Fleetwood spent six months refining the product, including beta testing with three of their dealers before generally releasing it to all of their dealers at their 1999 annual Dealers Conference. Fleetwood looked to Infor for assistance with its shipping. With Infor ERP for iSeries Release 6, a new no-charge add-on was being offered by Infor for COM Pick-Pack-Ship called OFFSHIP. OFFSHIP provides the ability to process shipments through Infor COM, bypassing the sometimes cumbersome COM Pick-Pack-Ship screen flow. Fleetwood split their plant into two virtual plants. The main plant was used to assemble the pop-up tent and the second to assemble the Coleman Caravan. Using Infor EPDM, Fleetwood set-up the Caravan site with the full indented bill of materials, and the second site as a single level with blow-through bill of material. This allowed Fleetwood to plan all production from the same master schedule. In addition, the power of the Infor Browser application allowed Fleetwood to add an entirely new product line without increasing Engineering record maintenance headcount. “Infor is a very flexible product that lets you stretch how you use it to resolve issues,” said Dale Gindlesperger.

Real Results

• 80 dealers signed up during the first year. Even better, the initial 80 dealers included most of Fleetwood’s largest dealers, along with a number of their more sophisticated mid-size to smaller dealers.
• Decrease in phoned-in orders.
• “We have taken advantage of the basic offerings of Infor’ COM_Net to provide additional support to our customers,” said Dale Gindlesperger, IT and Special Project Manager at Fleetwood Folding Trailers.
• Eliminated the need for additional headcount to Fleetwood’s shipping department.
• Reduced the clerical workload to the point that Fleetwood was able to transfer a full time and a half-time associate to areas that needed assistance, and was able to not add a seasonal temporary full-time associate—a double benefit and very visible ROI.
• Increased accuracy by putting the order auditing process in the hands of the associates doing the picking, which is where it should be.
• Eliminated a possible source of data entry error through either a miskey or misreading of an associate’s handwriting on the shipper (COM Pick List).
• The usual turnaround on parts is now 24 to 48 hours, instead of 7 to 10 days as it was prior to using the User Exits.
• Improvement in customer service.

For more information call: 800-877-9256 or email