Customer Success Story
Telephonics
High tech electronics leader improves its bottom line with Deltek Cospoint®
The Challenge
Telephonics, a $200 million subsidiary of Griffon Corporation (NYSE:GFF), has achieved worldwide leadership in maritime radar, integrated information and communication systems and integrated circuits, by adhering to two fundamental principles that trace back to the company's 70+ year-old roots. “It's all about trust and relationships with your partners and clients,” said Barry Fratello, Vice President of Finance. “There's a lot of great technology out there, but what separates good from great solutions are those that take into account requirements that you glean only from personal interaction.”
A longtime leader in defense contracting, Telephonics was originally a manufacturer of audio headsets in the 1930s, but developed a burgeoning reputation in the latter 20th century for cutting-edge radar technology, communications systems and integrated circuits. In the early 1990s, Telephonics began looking for opportunities to smooth the up and down cycles of defense spending by branching out into additional industries.
The Solution
It was then that Telephonics realized its core business infrastructure was going to need updating to accommodate that expansion. To support its new initiatives and growth both domestically and internationally, the company turned to Deltek Costpoint, the back-end accounting system at the core of the Deltek Enterprise suite, in 1993. The company also deployed Deltek Employee Self Service software to help manage human resources data, such as addresses, medical plan changes, 401K and other critical personnel data, for more than 1,100 employees. Telephonics even served as a beta test partner to the solution before Deltek brought it to market.
“Deltek Costpoint has been a key component of our success on many levels,” Fratello said. “Our infrastructure as it stood was simply not going to accommodate where we needed to take the company, from either a financial or support perspective. We needed to bring on a valued ERP partner, and we also needed to do it quickly.”
“There aren't a lot of companies that we would want to rely on as we do Deltek. But when you partner with Deltek to run your business systems, you get a very good feeling that they will ‘make it happen' regardless of your business requirements, or the stretches necessary to complete them,” said Barry Fratello, VP Finance.
The Benefits
With an eye on expansion of the company's core competencies, and a continued pulse on its core values, today Telephonics has expanded its market share within the aerospace and corporate markets significantly, as well as provided a new infrastructure that has doubled the company's revenue. According to Fratello, Costpoint has played a key role in supporting these initiatives, along with achieving both immediate and long-term financial savings for the company.
“We not only increased profits by reducing IT and finance expenditures, we have been able to think more strategically in our use of the data supplied by Costpoint,” he said. “We wanted to give our users more hands-on control of targeted data for decision-making.”
Telephonics recently took another important step forward in its relationship with Deltek by purchasing and successfully implementing the Deltek Enterprise procurement, manufacturing and materials management solutions in fall 2004.
“This software was a natural choice for us,” said Ron Farmer, CIO and vice president of Information Systems at Telephonics. “Not only is it fully integrated with Deltek accounting software, but it was superior to other systems evaluated at supporting our project-focused manufacturing model. Having a Deltek system installed lets a CIO sleep better.”