The Marena Group

The Marena Group focuses on a classic: American manufacturing. This Lawrenceville, Georgia maker of compression garments for athletic and post-surgical use has found that by embracing cutting-edge technology, it can produce garments domestically at a cost that competes favorably with offshore alternatives. In fact, the company exports roughly half its domestically-made goods to overseas markets a true exception in the garment field.

A key component of The Marena Group's technology base is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that optimizes the company's manufacturing operations and interaction with the supply chain. After many years with one product, VISUAL Manufacturing (recently acquired by Infor Global Solutions), the company found reasons to explore alternatives.

"Our existing application had undergone numerous updates and add-ons over time, making it difficult to maintain," said John Rogelstad, Director of Operations. "What's more, our software vendor didn't respond promptly or appropriately to change requests or reports of conflicts, which was putting a drain on our limited IT resources."

The Marena Group was looking for a solution that would:

• Incorporate open source software and the freedom and control over technology that comes with it
• Include the possibility of working with multiple systems over and above their ERP back-end, including a configure-to-order Web store
• Remove the disconnect between sales hype and product reality

"There really aren't very many high quality open source ERP alternatives on the market. xTuple was the only one we felt confident in," Rogelstad reported. "We decided that although xTuple is comparatively unknown, it has a lot going for it. It was much cheaper on the order of one-fifth the cost and more cohesive than the SAP offering. We realized that we could implement xTuple and link it to our Web store, all for the price of simply upgrading our old ERP system."

xTuple provided a solution that provided benefits including:

• Process of setup and installation is a straightforward affair
• Support for Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems gave Marena new technology options
• Drop in production lead time
• Platform in place that will enable future growth
• Stay price-competitive with its overseas domestic competition
• Manage the hugely diverse array of products offered
• Easy to administer and more stable than older systems 

"This is the beauty of open source," Rogelstad commented. "You get the benefit of many eyes checking each other's programming. It's the same principle that Freedom of Speech brings to our culture. Open and free dialog leads to higher quality debate or in this case, higher quality software."

Editor's Note:  Rogelstad later joined xTuple as Director of Product Development, after successfully training his replacement at The Marena Group, and working with company executives on a long-term transition plan.  The company continues to be a successful and active xTuple customer today.