The manufacturing industry is continually evolving and businesses need a robust Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution designed specifically for their industry that optimizes their business processes and provides timely information for critical business decisions. With too many technology options and no cohesive roadmap to success, many in the SMB sector feel left behind. The blanket statement for manufacturing is many of them are evolving as they always have, by investing in more people, more inventories, more equipment, and more facilities. Many businesses are not focused on back-office Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) automation yet. The Lake Companies is an ERP software support and solution provider for the manufacturing industry. Greg Lake, President of The Lake Companies says, “Manufacturing is a visual industry and executives have honed their skills on “seeing” the benefits offered by production equipment much more readily than benefits of back-office ERP automation.”
Many manufacturers, large and small don’t realize the lack of highly integrated back-office automation pushes a manufacturer into Flood Stage. The flood stage is a revenue level that cripples back-office productivity, inhibiting the entire organization’s ability to produce. The flood stage shows up at a point where revenue growth results in rapidly diminishing profit margins. The Lake Companies’ software applications are purpose-built to allow the customers to grow their revenue far beyond current flood-stage levels while reducing organizational costs. Greg is writing a book called “Your Opportunity River™”, which will expose and solve this and other problems plaguing even the best manufacturers. The result of using The Lake Companies’ products and strategies is their ability to scale revenue and profitability. He says, “How do we do it? Quite simply, by reimagining how work gets done and building higher levels of automation, including artificial intelligence (AI) into our Shop-Trak™, Doc-Trak™, Fact-Trak™, and APSME™ applications.”
Greg adds, “The Lake Companies is an Infor Channel Partner. Infor provides an excellent ERP system called SyteLine® that we sell and service. SyteLine has provided us with a 39-year opportunity to showcase our innovation. We are committed to carrying on the tradition of helping Infor make SyteLine the undisputed ERP leader in the SMB marketplace and have developed our products to do so.”
The Inception Story
The Lake Companies celebrated its 40th anniversary and is at the top of the industry with its software solutions and innovations taking the game to another level. The company believes in continuing to disrupt the manufacturing industry by replacing decaying practices, products, and procedures with more innovative solutions that are simple, elegant, and powerful. It focuses on making the customers’ workforce ultra-efficient by continuously simplifying the user and work experience.
For the past decade, manufacturers have had challenges to find new people. Greg expresses, “We didn’t predict this shortage, but back in the 1990’s we did see the business advantages of making their people ultra-efficient. That led us to focus our applications on creating amazing efficiency. We’ve gained a lot of experience and a sharper eye since then.”
The pursuit of perfection is obvious for the manufacturing industry as ultra-efficiency flat-lineslabor costs, allows the organization to grow, and generates greater profits while improving the quality of life for everyone in the organization. This solution is more valid when there is high competition for a shortage of quality talent.
Integrating Customer-Centric Innovations
The Lake Companies aspires to help clients harvest significant value from their internal resources by forever changing how the manufacturing world leverages technology to drive business results. This goal demands continuous innovation, which aligns with evolving technology; thus The Lake Companies must be a nimble organization that reacts quickly to market demands.
While the company focuses on its goal, the goal of those in the manufacturing industry is to focus on their businesses. The intersection of those goals is a target that delivers an incredibly successful and profitable business for the customers. “Our vision is to guide our customers to hit a perfect bullseye on a target they dream about, but cannot see, leveraging our applications to get there,” asserts Greg.
He adds, “A key to our solutions is they are not siloed, meaning they were designed to work together completely without the traditional silos and layers of technology users typically transition through. We streamlined the work experience and enhanced the user experience in the process.”
Expanding Horizons
The team at The Lake Companies has a shared vision to change the manufacturing world by building, supporting, and implementing solutions that creatively help manufacturers around the world scale their organizations.
The prominent company aims to further expand its reach in its Vision for 2023. “The result of Vision 2023 is to coalesce around the details and the bigger picture of our offering and set expectations for the New Year. One of our latest innovations expands our marketplace and offers significant game-changing benefits to our existing marketplace. This meeting will spend due time making everyone aware of our newfound capabilities as well as brainstorming how to maximize their impact. Since the components of that vision are already in place, we are very confident our team will exceed our expectations again in 2023,” concludes Greg.
