How a Kansas City window plant migrated ERP systems without stopping the floor.

The plant

EarthWise builds single and double hungs, sliders, casements, awnings and picture windows, mulled assemblies and shape tops, in vinyl. A job runs through a frame saw on a TigerStop, a sash saw, Stürtz welders, a screen bench, a glass line fed by a Perfect Score optimizer, assembly, QC and shipping — seven work centers, each with its own screen and scanner.

Before Extrusia, all of it ran on the plant's previous ERP, with a home-grown dashboard on top for the schedule, ready-to-ship and sales collections.

The problem with switching

The hard part of any switch is the cutover. Years of pricing lived in the old system — size books, option adders, mull charges, freight rules and individual dealer terms. A dealer portal, a plant schedule and a collections report the office reconciles to the bank all depended on it. And on any given day there are hundreds of windows on the floor, wearing the old system's stickers, on carts the old system planned.

What we did

Decoded the book, then proved it

The catalog, BOM formulas and price books were read out of the old system's own database rather than retyped. Then every recent real order was repriced in Extrusia and compared line by line. Each difference was classified by exact arithmetic — a rounding rule, an option the old system charged that the book had not carried, a customer's own term — and fixed in the data. In the final audit before cutover, 1,394 of 1,405 list-price lines since July landed within $0–$2 of the old system, and the few left over were explained individually.

Ran both systems side by side

For weeks Extrusia mirrored the old system live: every quote, order and bench scan. The production schedule, the bench boards and the ready-to-ship list in Extrusia were checked against the old system's own, so the plant could watch the two agree before relying on the new one.

Switched off on a Friday afternoon

On 25 September 2026 the mirror was turned off. The 99 open orders and 638 windows in production carried straight on in Extrusia: the jobs kept the numbers the crew knew, every work order had its route, and the bench boards showed the same work in the same words. The old system's stickers already on windows kept scanning at the benches, resolved to the right window.

Kept the history

Every old quote, order, dealer order, invoice and payment came across as a read-only record — on the old system's own figures, never repriced — and sales collections by rep tie out to the cent against the old reports, so year-on-year comparisons still work.

What changed after cutover

• Ready-to-ship moved to QC. A job now reaches the ready-to-ship board when QC signs it off, and the customer is emailed that their order is ready to collect — one email per order, with the shop copied.
• Glass counts every sealed unit. Each IG has its own sticker and its own scan, so a window is only through glass when all its units are made.
• The working week is the plant's. When EarthWise moved to four ten-hour days in October, the plant entered its new week once, and goals, promised dates and lead times followed it.
• Remakes from any bench. A defect found at assembly or QC is scanned, the part chosen, and the remake goes back to the bench that builds it.
• Dealers on Dealer Connect. Dealers quote and order on the same book the plant prices from.