A walk in a pair of cole Haans is pleasant indeed: renowned shoe manufacturer stomps deductions, past dues with help from I-many. (Advertisement).(Brief Article)

At Cole Haan's on-site gym, Lisa Randall sometimes finds herself pedaling next to company executives. In one such session, Randall learned from now-retired founder George Denny that Denny was a classmate of her grandmother's at Freeport High School, about seven miles north of Cole Haan's Yarmouth headquarters.

It's small-town Maine, where the credit manager can chat with the company founder while exercising. It's a land of wilderness, whitewater rivers, coastal villages and outdoor gear. It's also apparently a good place to start a luxury footwear empire.

NEW TORE IN TOWN

Denny started his career in footwear after graduation, going to work for E.E. Taylor as a leather cutter and shoemaker. The original factory still stands in Freeport, but now there's also a Cole Haan store in town, one of 62 across the country. Known for top-of-the-line shoes and accessories for men and women--its stores are typically found in posh neighborhoods like Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles and Michigan Avenue in Chicago--Cole Haan also sells through high-end department stores and "Mom & Pop" boutiques. All told, the Nike-owned company sells shoes through a network of more than 2,000 stores and employs more than 800 people, 215 at the corporate office.

In the business-to-business world, handling that kind of growth requires a significant investment in computing infrastructure, or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to manage inventories, orders, invoices, returns, human resources and other core business functions. Cole Haan made the jump to SAP R/3 in 1999 to manage its growth, going live over Thanksgiving weekend.

But in Randall's area of expertise--she's credit manager for key accounts--the company's growth meant making a case for additional software to manage accounts receivable exceptions like past-dues and deductions. Though SAP is very good at core functions, the system isn't necessarily geared toward exception settlement, Randall said.

"We knew we would have a problem (with collections and deductions) even before SAP was installed," she said, explaining that deductions are nor a significant issue in Europe, SAP's base. "Everyone in the footwear industry has run into this with ERP systems," she said. "They all have the same problem, they can't manage deductions. One person (from another footwear company) tells stories of four or five A/R employees all in her office crying!"