Steel-Fab Case Study
Giving management a solid structure for growth.
Steel-Fab is actively involved in manufacturing stainless steel components for the nuclear, food processing, aerospace, electronic and marine industries. They have also manufactured aluminum products for the marine, aerospace and energy industries.
A Hands-On Problem
Steel-Fab found that as they grew they were no longer able to keep up with their current manual processes. “We were hand-writing time sheets that were transferred into an Excel spreadsheet for Payroll,” says Rob Matter, Steel-Fab President. “We were using handwritten cost cards – for job tracking we would use these to post time and materials to a job.” Purchase orders were also hand written.
“This led to a myriad of problems: Our financial statements were always 6 months behind. Our materials use posting was always way behind. We had no idea for months if we were making money or losing money on individual projects.” Only after the fact, when they finally got the materials use and labor postings done, could they see how they did on each individual job, a process which took months.
A JobOps Solution
ICS Support implemented a job and cost tracking solution utilizing Sage MAS 90 ERP from Sage Software and JobOps from Synergistic Software Solutions LLC. “Now all our information is right at your fingertips” says Rob. “We can see exactly up to the hour how we are doing on the jobs”
The TimeTracker application from JobOps gives Steel-Fab employees the ability to clock in and out of jobs in seconds using bar coded tags. This has been a “huge plus” over the manual timecards they used to have. When asked about the integration of the timecards and payroll, Laura Bowker, Controller of Steel-Fab said “It is just the ease of it that I like”. They do weekly payroll, so the new system saves 10 to 12 hours per week just in time to get payroll done. It used to take hours to manually post time to jobs, but now the computer does all that automatically.
Visibility into purchasing is also a huge time savings. Materials are now posted directly to the jobs, so Steel-Fab can now see what is on order for the job, what has been received and where they are in the process of completion, all in one central place. Because they are able to separate regular from OT hours, they know exactly how many OT hours they have on a job. When a customer is paying to expedite a job, they pass on the OT hours to that customer. Before Steel-Fab installed their new system, they might have had to wait 3 weeks or longer to get an invoice to the customer because it took so long to manually post the time to the job. Now invoices go out immediately. The system keeps them from missing important details such as OT hours or changes. “It is really sweet that way,” Rob explains. “And the ability to create custom reports ‘specific to what needs we have’ is excellent.”
“Now all our information is right at our fingertips. And security is great, we are able to lock people out of certain areas while giving them access to what we want them to access.”
- Rob Matter,President, Steel-Fab