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"No," Metcalf corrected. "That's what we've spent since our inception -- 15 years ago."
Yet business was growing. BD added a European sales office, and began planning to open a factory in Asia. Suddenly, it became clear that the company's IT was lagging far behind.
"We realized IT was woefully inadequate," Metcalf says. "It was the definition of Rube Goldberg: tons of spreadsheets, weird one-off stuff held together with bubble gum and duct tape. We had the least we thought we needed to get by. Freedom is great, but the lack of integration moved from a strength to a liability. We had to change."
CFO Scot Carlson, who had been managing IT as well as finance, knew things had to change.
"I needed someone who knew more about IT than I did," he says. "We spent a lot of time debating whether it was worth making bigger investments into IT. The company [was] going to become more global and diversify, and we needed a strong IT backbone. We needed someone to figure out what we need to do to grow IT into a source of strength for the company and make sure it can carry us for another 10 years."
In 2004 Carlson hired Dees as an ERP consultant to help the company get more ROI from the system, which had been underused. Dees had the perfect background for the job. Eight years earlier, he had been managing a climbing gym in Ohio and gotten to know a BD sales rep, who invited him to visit Salt Lake City. Dees did and decided to move there two months later, going to work as a production supervisor on BD's ice line, where crampons and ice tools were made. Two years later, Dees quit the company to go back to college.
Dees earned a degree in computer science and got a job at Boeing as a software engineer. After five years at the aircraft maker, Dees went back to Black Diamond in the consulting job.
By this time, BD had moved to an ERP system made by Navision Software (now owned by Microsoft and sold as Microsoft Dynamics NAV). This system had promised to make manufacturing more efficient, but the company wasn't using all of its capabilities. "My goal was not to modify the system," Dees says. "I wanted to help the process owners using the system discover the functionality. Other systems had been built in-house that the ERP system was intended to do. [I focused] on user training and cultural change; this is a company full of a bunch of rock climbers. We're still exploiting new things from the ERP system."
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