Swing-N-Slide: Swift Esales

Child's play is serious business at

Swing-N-Slide, manufacturers of wooden

outdoor playground equipment. Twenty

years ago, the only quality playground

products designed for back yards were

expensive, pre-cut wooden swing sets

priced over $1,000. Swing-N-Slide

recognized an unmet need, and began

selling strong, durable and lower-cost

playground projects. Today their line

of do-it-yourself wooden playground

equipment is the market leader in the

United States, sold worldwide through

6,000 home center, building supply and

hardware stores.

Swing-N-Slide recognized the need

for a robust financial system early on,

and has used MAS 200 as its backbone

for nearly a decade. "MAS 200 has done

everything for us almost since time

began," says Scott LaCourse, IT manager.

"It manages our order processing and all

the fundamental accounting functions,

including payables, receivables, general

ledger and payroll. It's working so well

that as we've grown, we haven't even

considered switching products.We knew

the right choice was upgrading to

MAS 200 for SQL Server."

The customer database contains

about 12,000 entries. Of those, between

4,000 and 6,000 are active retailers.

"I like being able to put a flag in the

Acounts Receivable module to indicate

which partners are featured on our

Web site retailer locator," LaCourse says.

"Their information goes straight from

the database to the locator, which saves

me a lot of time."

Quarterly taxes are reported using

the Magnetic Media module, in compliance

with state requirements. "We just load the tax-related tables, and MAS 200 does

the rest," LaCourse notes.

Accuracy Saves Money

Major trading partners insist on their

vendors communicating via an electronic

data interchange (EDI). For five years

Swing-N-Slide has used a third-party

integrated module written specifically for

MAS 90 and MAS 200 for transactions

with its 20 biggest customers. "On a busy

day, our EDI handles about 175 orders,"

notes LaCourse. "I doubt we could do

that volume if we had to take orders

manually and rekey them into the system.

Having an EDI interface means that our

data in MAS 200 is very accurate."

Accuracy is also enhanced by a

modification to the Sales Order module

that checks for duplicate purchase order

numbers.