Imperial Industries takes Infor XA output beyond the standard
Two weeks after go-live, the Wisconsin manufacturer is running its Infor XA documents through InterformNG2 and into Infor Document Management, with label printing next.
- Industry
- Manufacturing
- Business area
- Vacuum tanks and bulk storage
- Country
- United States
- ERP
- Infor XA on IBM i
Customer overview
Imperial Industries, Inc. builds vacuum tanks and trucks for septic, portable restroom and specialist applications, along with bulk storage tanks and silos, from its base in Rothschild, Wisconsin. The company has been manufacturing for more than 42 years, having grown out of an agricultural equipment business, and now supplies municipalities, service fleets and industrial facilities across the United States.
Design engineering, fabrication, welding, testing and service all sit under one roof, which gives Imperial direct control of quality and lead times. The business runs on Infor XA.
The challenge
The hardest part of the project was not the documents. Before InterformNG2 could build anything, the source data had to come out of the IBM i reliably, and one manufacturing document would not generate at all. That held the project up for a period until it was resolved at source.
Once the data was available, the document work moved quickly.
The project
Imperial’s output requirements went past what Infor XA covers on its own. The company chose InterformNG2 for document output and went live in mid August 2026. Shawn Edmondson, Director of Information Technology, reports a go-live with no major issues, just the usual collection of small items to clear and nothing that held the business up.
A deliberate decision shaped the work. Rather than continue with flat spool files, Imperial converted its output to XML. Where the data arriving from XA needed tidying, Shawn wrote XPath expressions himself to normalise it before it reached the document.
What Imperial is using
Documents are the first phase. InterformNG2 collects output from the IBM i out queues and spool files, builds the document, and delivers it into Infor Document Management, so a purchase order reissued to a vendor carries a version history rather than an untraceable second print. Paper is produced only where paper is wanted. A small number of documents, cheques among them, were deliberately left as flat files where there was no benefit in converting them.
Shawn builds and maintains the workflows himself. Adeel Ghulam Hussain at Interform supplies document corrections, most of them returned within the hour. The manufacturing order was the most complex document in the set; the rest were straightforward.
"Our output needs went beyond what XA does on its own. InterformNG2 closed that gap completely - and I am absolutely loving it."
Shawn Edmondson, Director of Information Technology, Imperial Industries, Inc.
Looking ahead
Label printing is the next phase, using the same designer and the same workflow model that Imperial already knows. Advanced PDF, which merges related transaction documents into statements and reminders, is under discussion for later.
Talk to Interform about your ERP output
A 30-minute call. We look at the documents your ERP produces today, which of them still need someone to touch them, and what InterformNG2 would automate first. You leave knowing what would change and what would stay as it is.
