A polished supply chain

Reduced shipping costs are among finishing touches to a cabinetmaker's All-Star project.

Four years ago, MasterBrand Cabinets CIO Dave Mewes faced one of the toughest challenges of his career. Fortune Brands, the parent holding company, wanted to diversify its portfolio of cabinet products and began an acquisition spree under the MasterBrand name.

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Applications Enterprise All-Stars

Guide to the '06 All-Stars Winners alphabetical listing WINNERS BY TECHNOLOGY Applications | LANs & Routers | Network Management | OS, Servers & Data Center | Security | Storage | WAN, VoIP & Convergence | Wireless & Mobility WINNERS BY INDUSTRY Construction | Education | Financial Services | Government | Healthcare | Manufacturing | Media | Retail | Travel/Transportation | Utilities Vendors to the All-Stars

Four years ago, MasterBrand Cabinets CIO Dave Mewes faced one of the toughest challenges of his career. Fortune Brands, the parent holding company, wanted to diversify its portfolio of cabinet products and began an acquisition spree under the MasterBrand name.

Mewes' mission soon became clear: Tie together the supply-chain management systems of six diverse business units and four sales channels without replacing the dozens of legacy systems used by each group.

"We couldn't go in and rip everything out, because we had a business to run. And we weren't really under one large umbrella, so we couldn't completely unify," he says.

Mewes had to figure out an alternate way to gain visibility into the disparate order-entry systems, which included everything from SAP databases to CAD/CAM file stores to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, so that all of the business units and sales channels could view critical information in real time.

The resulting effort, which has saved the company a bundle while making supply-chain management far more efficient, has earned MasterBrand a 2006 Enterprise All-Star Award.