Kaman Essay

Kaman Industrial Technologies Corporation (Kaman) is a Power Transmission Distributor with $1.2 billion in revenue in 2015. Kaman has 240 locations across the United States including local branches, distribution centers, specialty fabrication shops and corporate offices. Kaman is the largest division of Kaman Corporation, a public company traded as KAMN on the NYSE. Compared in size to other distributors of Power Transmission products and services, Kaman is distant third behind Motion Industries and Applied Industrial Technologies. Kaman has grown from a modest beginning from Kaman Bearings through many acquisitions over the last forty years. Being an employee with Kaman for over fourteen years has given the author many opportunities to

The system can show inventory in any of the company’s locations or distribution centers in real time instantly for quoting purposes or during order entry – at the time an incredible edge to have over the competition. Since then Kaman has been making small improvements on that system as computer technology and information software has increased in value exponentially in capabilities and user friendliness. Although some features and applications have been modified for extra functionality the system, for the user, is extremely rigid, requiring knowledge of “Command Line” commands very much like DOS. Each user is connected to the system through a system called a terminal. This is the main system that is still in use today for Inventory, Order Entry, Purchasing and standard reporting. The main-frame computer still runs and prints many reports automatically every night whereas then a human must then try to interpret that data in a useful way. Sometime about 2012 Kaman began using a system from IBM called Cognos. This is a data warehouse front end where a user can access data through a web browser to build custom reports for exactly the data they want by filtering as well as email or convert that report into Excel or PDF format. Many of the reports now generated come from Cognos as this provides the ability to make ad-hoc reports very simply. Cognos is a good

Due to the growth of Kaman organically and through acquisitions it was natural for Kaman to begin the process of moving to an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system Kaman has spent years and millions of dollars with Infor to develop a highly-customized version of their SxE software that will fit Kaman’s way of doing business. Many setbacks have forced the development team to push back the implementation to 2017. Until Kaman has implemented the ERP system there will be no focus on an enterprise wide internal structure of data sharing and management that has the scope of Operations, Sales, Customer Service and