Omni USA, Inc.

Houston, TX
omnigear.com

Nasdaq trading symbol:  OUSA
 

Reviewer: David M. Sallean, CFO

BACKGROUND: Omni U.S.A.'s power transmissions keep industrial, agricultural, and off-highway work from grinding to a halt. The company's Omni Gear division manufactures geardrives that power posthole diggers, rotary cutters, wheel-driven irrigation systems, forklifts, and other heavy machines. Made in China through a joint venture with a Shanghai enterprise, the transmission products account for more than 75% of Omni U.S.A.'s sales. The company also makes heavy-duty jacks and couplers that raise and lower trailer and machinery tongues. The jacks and couplers are sold under the Butler name to OEMs and aftermarket distributors of heavy-duty trailers.

HARDWARE PLATFORMS: Windows NT network. Their world-wide operations use Plus & Minus with Microsoft’s Terminal Server running over the internet.

PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: Plus & Minus brings a refreshing, new approach to how accounting software should work. Compared to Plus & Minus, other accounting software is needlessly complex and difficult to use.

Plus & Minus is a single-file design accounting program. In part, what this means is that there are no modules for the individually listed functions. Instead, all functions are available at all times. Omni uses the general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, inventory control, sale order, purchase order, work order, budgeting, management reporting, job costing, account reconciliation and analysis functions of Plus & Minus. Plus & Minus is powerful, non-industry specific accounting software which can be readily adapted to nearly every situation.

While it is difficult to value the stress and strain of using other products, the productivity gains Omni experienced through the use of Plus & Minus are almost too numerous to list. Perhaps the most significant comes from the time independence that Plus & Minus offers. With Omni’s former modular system, we were caught in a vicious cycle of the Accounting Department waiting on the Manufacturing Department to enter a whole month of purchase orders and job cost information. Then the Manufacturing Department waited for the Accounting Department to close its books before it could make new entries. No department was ever caught up. The strain on management, the inconvenience of having to make major changes to the natural flow of business operations, and the complete frustration among departments was completely eliminated through Plus & Minus.

STRENGTHS: The greatest strength of Plus & Minus has already been mentioned - time independence. There are no postings and no closings. All transactions are available all the time. In addition to this strength, the ease with which Plus & Minus makes accounting information available to or from other applications, like spreadsheets and data bases, is unique.

The ability to quickly see, on screen if you wish, an entire accounting transaction. With most other nationally recognized accounting programs, one is left with either printing an entire batch of transactions or undertaking tedious procedures to trace a transaction through the various modules involved. None of this is required when using Plus & Minus.

With Plus & Minus power interruptions or other abnormal ends to a computing session, at the worst, result in the loss of data for the last entry - not the last batch or the last day's work.

WEAKNESSES: The most noticeable weakness of Plus & Minus is the descriptiveness of its documentation. Although it seems that all of Plus & Minus' features, keystrokes, etc. are covered in the manual, someone making an inquiry can be left unsatisfied with the completeness of what they found. However, the amount of context-sensitive, on-screen help has grown over the years, and this mitigates the need for documentation. Plus & Minus needs Wizards to help with report options.

PRODUCT CHARACTERISTICS: Loading the program can be measured in minutes. Setting up the account structures and configuring printers can take as little as an hour or two, depending on the complexity of the system (network, number of printers, etc.) and the number of users. To assist with the set up of thousands of customers, vendors, and employees, Plus & Minus can easily import this information from other sources, typically via spreadsheets or data bases. What we have observed is that once users have become familiar with a function or procedure in one area of Plus & Minus, it is easy to transfer this familiarity to other areas. Like all good software, Plus & Minus has a predictable and discernable flow to it.

PRODUCT DELIVERABLES: Plus & Minus produces standard reports like income statements, balance sheets, statements of cash flows, committed revenues and costs, general and detail ledgers, trial balance and aging for both receivables and payables. Performance reports, such as an income statement, can be compared against a budget for any time period. In addition, the Plus & Minus Management Reporting feature provides income statements and balance sheets by the job, department, cost center, etc. All of the Management Reports can have varying time periods for the reports and have comparisons against a budget. Clearly, one of Plus & Minus' strengths is its reporting features and flexibility.

SELECTION CRITERIA: When I joined Omni U.S.A., I came from another large public-traded company that used a very expensive well-known modular-based system. Plus & Minus does all the reporting of the large system and more.