Tolphi Manufacturing designs and manufactures high-accuracy measurement systems used by aerospace, automotive and electronics manufacturers around the world. Its machines are built to order, often with dozens of options, and are supported in the field for a decade or more after installation.
For years the company ran on a heavily customized on-premise ERP. It worked, but every change was slow and expensive, and support for the underlying release was ending. With a growing service business and plans for further acquisitions, leadership asked Oraya® to help it move to a modern cloud platform without losing the history its service teams depended on.
Challenges
The company faced a combination of technical and business pressures:
- An end-of-support ERP with more than a thousand custom objects
- Configure-to-order products that required manual handoffs between sales, engineering and manufacturing
- Service contracts, installed-base records and spare parts managed in separate tools
- Reporting built on nightly extracts that were often out of date by mid-morning
- No repeatable way to bring acquired businesses onto the core system
Why Oraya
Tolphi Manufacturing wanted a partner with deep high-tech manufacturing experience and a clear point of view on migration. Oraya recommended a selective transition: carry over master data, open orders and service history, redesign core processes around standard practices, and move remaining extensions to the Business Technology Platform. The team started with an automated analysis of the existing code base and usage data, showing which customizations were still in active use and which could be retired or replaced by standard functionality.
“Their custom code analysis changed the conversation. Once we saw how little of it we actually needed, the whole program got simpler.”
— Director of Business Systems, Tolphi Manufacturing
Implementation highlights
- Selective migration to SAP Cloud ERP Private Edition, preserving installed-base and service history
- Standard variant configuration linking quotes, engineering and production orders
- Roughly two thirds of custom objects retired; the rest rebuilt as side-by-side extensions
- Integrated service management covering contracts, field visits and spare parts
- Embedded analytics for backlog, margin and service profitability
- Three full cutover rehearsals, followed by a weekend go-live with minimal production downtime
Outcome
Configured orders now flow from quote to shop floor without re-entry, which has shortened order processing and reduced errors on complex machines. Service teams see each customer’s installed base, contracts and parts history in one place, helping technicians arrive with the right parts the first time. Managers track backlog and margin in real time rather than waiting for overnight reports, and finance now closes each month two days sooner than before.
The IT team, freed from maintaining years of custom code, now focuses on improvements that matter to the business. When the company acquired a small software firm the following year, it was running on the new platform within weeks. Read more about this style of modernization in From Legacy to Leading Edge.
