The Columbia Forest Products project

Columbia Forest Products (CFP) is North America's finest manufacturer of hardwood veneer, hardwood plywood, flooring and laminated products. Sold through a network of wholesale distributors, mass merchandisers and major OEMs, Columbia Forest Products' decorative interior veneers and panels are used in high-end cabinetry, fine furniture, architectural millwork and commercial fixtures.

CFP has embarked on an extensive Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system implementation for its Plywood Division that will tie together the manufacturing, distribution, sales, and accounting functions and provide greater control and accuracy of the business processes throughout the division. The focus of the project is to provide Perfect service, every time to CFP customers, ensuring that the customer receives their product of choice, made with highest quality and delivered at the right time. The system is being installed in CFP locations across North America, linking together CFP sites and CFP customers via a common database and common processes.

The reports generated daily by this new system can be very detailed and can be several hundred pages long. The SANFACE Software txt2pdf PRO utility allows CFP to take text output and create a document that is easily sent via email to be viewed uniformly on each end user's PC. With txt2pdf, CFP can greatly reduce the size of a report through compression, which reduces network load significantly. The txt2pdf software is particularly useful given the heavy load that transferring and printing massive reports would create on CFP’s intranet. Because CFP’s manufacturing facilities are located in rural areas where bandwidth can be expensive, the utility has significantly reduced potential transmission costs as well.