At Shop Floor Experts we continually strive to exceed our client’s expectations.
Listed below are a few comments from our customers.

Keith Duemler (Engineer) – Porta-King Building Systems Steve’s knowledge of the product software is outstanding, and even better is his ability to understand the customers business needs. (read full article)

Dean Cook (CFO) – Porta-King Building Systems It is difficult to bridge the gap between’s a consultant’s understanding of the software and an all-encompassing solution to a company’s challenges unique to their business. The situation demands the need to understand a new business and the ability to apply the full functionality of the software to that business’ special needs. Steve excels in this process. (read full article)

Joan Barmat (CFO) – J. Robert Scott I believe that I am qualified to say that Steve Feril is that rare example of a consultant who provides such a strong fundamental service that as a client, we are more than happy to pay for every second of his time. (read full article)

Christian P. Litke (Manager of Continuous Improvement) – Caval Tool Steve obviously posses a strong knowledge of the product and very effectively leveraged his own background as well as his experiences with other clients to help drive through our own issues and questions (read full article)

Keith Duemler (Engineer) – Porta-King Building Systems
http://www.portaking.com/

I want to pay a special thank you to our Frontstep (MAPICS) configuration specialist – Mr. Steven Feril. I was responsible for the configuration models for the Porta-King division. This included a total of eleven complex models. Mr. Feril just finished upgrading our models to use the Trilogy Performance Pack. His knowledge of the product is outstanding, and even better is his ability to understand the customers business needs. He was able to relate to our business and create solutions with the software in an amazing short time frame.

When we first started our model development two years ago, we went though two configuration consultants and spent months of time getting nowhere. When Mr. Feril arrived on-site, the first question he asked was, “Can I see your overall project scope?”. This is something he does as a consultant to set a plan for the project, so everyone knows who should do what and when they should do it. Unfortunately, we didn't do this with the other two consultants and wasted valuable time. In about half the time each consultant worked on the project, Mr. Feril was able to develop, test, and implement the models. Again, his knowledge of the product software along with his ability to learn our business and relate the two together was outstanding. Thanks to Steve, he created working models for our company and also tutored myself in model development.

Dean Cook (CFO) – Porta-King Building Systems
http://www.portaking.com/

As Keith Duemler mentioned our initial experience with Configuration Consultants was less than ideal. It is difficult to bridge the gap between a consultant’s understanding of the software and an all-encompassing solution to a company’s challenges unique to their business. The situation demands the need to understand a new business and the ability to apply the full functionality of the software to that business’ special needs. Steve excels in this process. He has been able to take a complicated process, helped us build functioning models and passed the baton to our people to maintain and improve the models.

Steve also helped us with an ongoing problem we encountered for several months that could not be solved by our software’s support staff. We were experiencing intermittent errors in several of our models and the support group could not figure out what the problem was. We tried to supply as much information as we could, but over the phone with support we were unable to establish the source of the problems or resolve them. Steve was able to surface the problem and solve it while he was here assessing our project to implement the Trilogy configuration performance pack.

Last, but not least, Steve’s personality, professionalism and work ethics are beyond reproach. He is a pleasure to work with and he has been a key in solidifying our ongoing relationship with our ERP provider. We look forward to continuing our working relationship with him.

Joan Barmat (CFO) – J Robert Scott, Inc.
http://www.jrobertscott.com/

At my request, Steve Feril provided me with your name as that of his “supervisor”. I made the request because I want to make sure that it is well known in your organization what an extraordinary job Steve has done for J. Robert Scott, Inc. (‘JRS’).

Briefly, we chose your company as our custom furniture division operating system in early 1999 on the recommendation of independent systems consultants. We engaged these consultants to help us implement your software however within a short timeframe we mutually determined that they had not succeeded. At this point I contacted our Account manager, to try to obtain some idea of what consulting assistance you would be able to offer at this late date. His response was that while they didn't have a ‘triage’ unit, he would see what he could do.

What he was able to do in finding Steve Feril for us was essentially ‘save’ our implementation. While other consultants have been helpful to us, Steve stands apart and ahead of any of them in relevant expertise and overall approach.

Perhaps it is because our configuration needs are relatively complex compared to other clients; Steve’s advance configuration/programming skills are particularly useful to us. Immediately, upon observing what we were trying to do, he was able to make critically helpful configuration suggestions via demonstration and training. Beyond his sheer technical configuration abilities he brought to bear a broad and deep manufacturing experience that added significantly to our understanding of how the software can work for us.

Beyond these technical considerations, Steve’s consulting ‘approach’ and attitude also stand in our view apart and ahead of other consultants (ours and others) we have worked with. He is proactive and energetic. He solves or helps solve most problems by either knowing an answer or getting one from an appropriate source. He ‘attacks’ frustrating problems and does not become impatient or overwhelmed by them.
When Steve is expected to spend time at J. Robert Scott, all of us involved with this project have the comforting sense of our ‘mainstay support’ arriving, i.e. someone who will help us sort out the laundry list of problems was have encountered since his last visit. His performance stands in stark juxtaposition to that of the consultants who introduced us to your software. They were superficially impressive and substantially weak, with limited relevant expertise and ‘massive’ misguided corporate political involvement. Steve, by contrast is quiet, technically strong and apolitical.
I have both seen many consultants and have in fact, spent some time as one myself at several points in my career. So I believe that I am qualified to say that Steve Feril is that rare example of a consultant who provides such a strong fundamental service that as a client, we are more than happy to pay for every second of his time. Going forward, I can only hope that we will be able to ‘claim’ more of his time as this often appears difficult. This suggests to me that others among your customers agree with our assessment of his abilities and contributions.
Overall, you may not think you have a triage unit – but as far as J. Robert Scott is concerned we are the beneficiary of one. I assume that you are well aware of the resource you have in Steve Feril, but I (unfortunately) find such performance so rare, that I think it always needs to be specially recognized.

Christian P. Litke (Project Manager) – Caval Tool

This memo is in regards to my recent experience with implementation consultant Steven M. Feril. I am the Manager of Continuous Improvement for Caval Tool Division (Chromalloy Gas Turbine Corp.) and am part of a small team of people responsible for converting to a new ERP system. We have a couple of ex-consultants in the group and are performing the majority of the work ourselves with some support from our ERP vendor.
Prior to last week my general impression of our ERP provider had been fairly poor. The perception can from my contact with the regional sales personnel, customer support, and the web-page support. The primary reason for using this ERP package is due to the fact that a number of divisions within Chromalloy are using it, and we are trying to standardize divisions as much as possible. If this was not the case, and considering my initial impression of the software services, I would have looked more closely at selecting another ERP provider.

Steve came to Caval Tool for a four day consulting session. Half of the time, we spent in training and the other half we spent focusing Caval specific issues and general implementation issues. I found Steve to be an excellent resource for our project team. Having being a consultant for one of the big five myself for five years, I have fairly high expectations for other consultants. Steve obviously posses a strong knowledge of the product and very effectively leveraged his own background as well as his experiences with other clients to help drive through our own issues and questions. In addition, Steve’s facilitation skills were also key in leading our group which tended to be divergent at times. He was a great assistance in maintaining our group’s focus and direction. One area that I thought Steve handled particularly well was his follow-up on open items from each day’s session. I appreciated Steve’s honesty when he did not explicitly have an answer to a question, but he either followed up personally or gave us a contact person that would help us.

I expressed my initial concerns about our ERP vendor to Steve and thanked him for the solid work he performed here. He has helped install confidence in me that we have not made a strategic mistake by selecting out ERP vendor. Additionally, we have asked him to return to our facility to continue working with him leveraging his skills, experience, and most importantly his dedication.