Seachem Laboratories
Georgia
Established in 1981 by Dr. Leo Morin, Seachem Laboratories' founding principle was that products should actually work and do what they are advertised to do. Seachem manufactures products for aquariums and ponds. These products include chemicals for buffering the pH, removing ammonia, medicating, dechlorinating and filtering the water.
Seachem began using Helix in 1990, and still being a relatively small company at the time, Dr. Morin was able to write the application himself. Early on the the program handled invoices, payrolls, and inventories. Over the years it has continued to grow as the business grows, easily adding on requested features from employees.
In 1994, Dr. Morin retired as associate professor in the School of Medicine from Emory University, and became full time CEO, and Scientific Director of Seachem. Seachem now occupies about 24,000 square feet, which includes production and research laboratories, manufacturing, shipping, and inventory space.
Currently Helix handles every aspect of our business such as accounts receivables, accounts payable, banking, payroll, inventory, work jobs, and order tracking. Without Helix, Seachem would have spent either more time, or more money to obtain the same level of functionality in another application development environment.
As a further testament to the power of Helix, a few years back Dr. Morin's son, Greg, now the director of the company, wrote a Helix application for the biotech firm where his wife worked in South Bend, Indiana. This application is even more extensive than the one used by Seachem, offering an inventory control system, double entry accounting system, and customized form generation. The low cost and rapid development time convinced the firms owner to switch not only from Fox Pro to Helix but from an all-PC environment to all-Mac as well.