Columbus McKinnon Corporation (NASDAQ:CMCO) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from Walter Liptak of Seaport Research. Please go ahead.

Walter Liptak: Hey, thank you. Good morning, guys.

David Wilson: Hi, Walter.

Walter Liptak: I just wanted to follow-up on the productivity system that you’re putting in the ERP, is that started going in? And I just want to get an idea of what the size of that manufacturing location, maybe as a percentage of square footage or whatever? But are you expecting or could we see some disruptions similar to what we saw with that ERP ramp?

David Wilson: No. Now while we have a 600% roughly manufacturing facility over in Künzelsau, Germany, it’s our largest manufacturing facility. We — it’s the STAHL acquisition effectively. We implemented SAP went live, had good success in the wake of that implementation as we continue to ramp volume and mix shift that Greg referenced to a more engineered order. Balance of production had an impact on planning activities, somewhat impacted by supply chain challenges as well. And that created a level of disruption in the period that lead to productivity losses. We are implementing a — an adjustment to the planning module for that system. It’s an additional tool that we’re confident will enable our ETL, highly complex ETL business to have a much more efficient planning and execution process.

And don’t anticipate that’ll have a disruptive impact on the business and we’re implementing that as we speak, and that will continue into the first quarter of next fiscal year when we’ll start to see some benefits begin to be realized.

Walter Liptak: Okay, great. And then, Greg, during the — thanks for that, David. You talked about that $3.7 million productivity issue. I’m sorry, could you just provide the details of that again?

Greg Rustowicz: Yes. So that — so the negative productivity is largely due to this issue that we’re talking about, with the mix shift at our Künzelsau factory. And remember, the STAHL business is the highly engineered explosion protected products, and they have very, very complex bombs that are more than — that are much more than SAP can handle. So we’d have to add an additional system onto it that will help us from a planning perspective and it will increase — it really will improve our production planning as well as improve our capacity utilization, which is really where the productivity factor comes into play. So that was the lion’s share of the negative productivity that we had.

Walter Liptak: Okay, great. Okay. Okay. And then I wanted to ask about the — there was a comment, David, I think that you made about lower quote to order turns. When they asked about last quarter, and the second quarter, you called out that there was a lot of quoting activity. Was there something that changed in the last 3 months that where there’s delays in some of these quote to order times?

David Wilson: Yes, so quote activity, Walt, actually is remaining very robust. We’re in great conversations with customers, there’s high levels of demand around quotation activity. The conversion on those quotes to orders has taken longer, and what we saw was that that began to take effect in Q2, and we talked about that in the last call, that’s what you’re referring to, I believe. And as we progress through this quarter, we saw that continue. But we are seeing many projects that had been stuck in that cycle start to break loose as we’ve come into January. And that’s very encouraging. I don’t know, in all cases, what all the drivers are, but I would say, we’re seeing a new capital budget as people enter their new fiscal periods.