Thermo Design Engineering

After more than two decades on Sage 300 CRE, Thermo Design Engineering had reached the limits of its legacy system. What once served as a dependable financial tool could no longer keep up with the complexity and pace of a growing, globally distributed business. The lack of integration between systems meant that every department was operating in isolation. Without real-time visibility, decisions were delayed, processes were duplicated, and inefficiencies multiplied.

Sage 300 CRE had served Thermo Design well when it was first implemented in 2001, but two decades later the system was showing its age. Designed for a different era of business, it lacked the flexibility, integration, and scalability that a modern engineer-to-order manufacturer requires. As the company expanded into new markets and added subsidiaries overseas, the limitations of its legacy environment became increasingly disruptive.

The platform could no longer connect the dots between engineering, procurement, manufacturing, and finance. There was no native integration with the company’s CAD systems, customer relationship management tools, or procurement workflows, forcing teams to rely on spreadsheets and manual imports to share information. Every process, from updating job costs to reconciling purchase orders, required extra steps that consumed time and increased the likelihood of errors.

Critical information was trapped in silos. Engineers worked from one dataset, procurement from another, and finance from yet another. The lack of a unified system meant that even small inconsistencies could ripple across departments, creating delays and requiring constant reconciliation. What once felt like a dependable system had become a bottleneck, reliable in name only and increasingly out of sync with the pace of Thermo Design Engineering’s global operations.

Thermo Design’s day-to-day operations depended heavily on manual processes that were prone to inefficiency and error. Project managers and engineers relied on spreadsheets to track materials, job costs, and procurement activities, making it difficult to maintain consistency or accuracy across departments. Data lived in multiple versions of the same file, updated by different teams at different times, which meant no one had a single, reliable source of truth.

Bills of Materials were entered by hand, line by line, leaving room for discrepancies and slowing down the engineering process. A single adjustment to a design or component could take hours to reflect across systems. Many quality inspections were still recorded on paper forms and filed manually, which made it challenging to maintain traceability or ensure timely follow-up when issues were found. Financial visibility suffered as well. Some labor costs were only updated once a month, leaving project managers without the real-time insights they needed to monitor profitability or course-correct on active projects. The result was a reactive workflow that depended on hindsight rather than live data.

These gaps in automation and data flow created not only inefficiencies but also risk. Without accurate, up-to-date information, leadership had limited confidence in the numbers guiding critical decisions. The company needed a solution that would bring together its people, data, and processes into one connected system capable of providing immediate, actionable insight.

As Thermo Design continued to expand its footprint, the limitations of its existing systems became impossible to ignore. The company had grown into a global operation with four subsidiaries spread across Canada, the Middle East, and Europe. Yet, it was still relying on tools that had been designed for a much smaller, more localized business.

The absence of multi-entity and multi-currency functionality created constant friction in financial management. Each subsidiary maintained its own records, and consolidations had to be performed manually, consuming valuable time and increasing the likelihood of discrepancies. Reporting cycles were slow, meaning leadership often made decisions based on outdated information. It was increasingly difficult to gain a real-time understanding of profitability, cash flow, or project performance across the organization.

The challenge was not simply about keeping pace with growth but about managing it intelligently. Thermo Design’s engineer-to-order business model required precise coordination between engineering, procurement, and manufacturing. Without an integrated platform, scaling these operations across multiple geographies introduced complexity at every step, from procurement and scheduling to billing and compliance.