Job shop improves scheduling, on-time delivery with new ERP system

Situation

Brunswick Steel, Winnipeg, Man., is a full-service steel production job shop that carries sheet, plate, and long products used by manufacturing and construction companies across western Canada.

When General Manager Adam Plouffe joined the company a few years ago, he saw a business with one foot in the past and one in the future. The company operated a variety of modern steel cutting and processing equipment, but many facets of the production processes used outdated manual procedures. And the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system was a major concern.

ERP software is designed to make all aspects of running a business—scheduling, purchasing, labor and material costing, inventory, shipping, accounting, and customer service—faster and simpler. While Brunswick Steel’s old system handled the stock side of the business fairly well, it was woefully inadequate on the processing side, functioning more like service center software than an ERP system.

The software wasn’t able to handle the company’s more complex custom jobs, especially on the processing side of the business. Financials were done in a separate system that wasn’t very flexible.

“The manual processes forced us to do a lot of workarounds,” said Plouffe. “The system couldn’t export all the data from the sales department to production. This required us to use a lot of Excel spreadsheets and make a lot of conversions to process jobs. Our production team was spending about 25% of its time on administrative activities: manually recording when jobs started, how long they took, what material was used—all the stuff that ERP should automate.”

Having used ERP at previous jobs, Plouffe convinced ownership that the company needed the software.

“We created a core team that included stakeholders from each department. This team created a matrix of all our needs,” he explained. “To sell the idea, before we could conduct any serious research, involved identifying our business needs one department at a time and pointing out all the workarounds that were slowing us down.”

Resolution

After researching six systems, the company chose Global Shop Solutions ERP software.

“Right off the bat it looked like [the system] offered wins for most of our departments,” Plouffe said. “The big ‘a-ha!’ for me was the Advanced Planning and Scheduling module. When I saw how it can schedule jobs, precisely track capacity, automate purchasing supply and demand, and provide immediate financial data, I knew it was the right system for us.”

The company saw immediate improvement on the production side when recording jobs, as manual administrative tasks were eliminated without having to train employees on the new system. Another benefit was the system’s ability to integrate with third-party software.

“We used to track laser cutting manually,” said Plouffe. “Since integrating our nesting software with Global Shop Solutions, the tracking is much quicker and simpler. Every time it cuts a part, we have actual data on each part made from the nested sheet. As with so many processes, it’s all about eliminating the time and errors involved with manual data transfer.”

And most important, the company now has a master schedule, allowing sales, purchasing, finance, and production to work off the same data in real time.

“In the past we needed manual calculations to understand our capacity, which frequently resulted in overselling it. We would tell sales we have eight hours of laser capacity available today, and six different reps would sell eight hours each. Then it’s a scramble to rework the schedule, reset the due dates, and keep customers happy,” said Plouffe.

“Working from the same master schedule has eliminated that problem while improving on-time delivery for custom jobs. It has enabled us to change some of our stock goods from one or two days to same-day delivery. We’ve also reduced inventory to limit our exposure to volatile markets while increasing turns in purchasing. The purchasing module has made inventory tracking much more accurate.”