Heat Treatments Ltd provides manufacturing, grinding, and machining services in an ISO9001-certified machine shop. Headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand, Heat Treatments provides a reliable one-stop sourcing solution for manufacturers needing specialized engineered parts.
As the business continued to grow, so did the need for a more flexible, customizable ERP product that could manage the company’s two separate business streams in an all-in-one system. That’s when they acquired Global Shop Solutions ERP and went live in November 2019. According to General Manager Fergus Thomson, Global Shop Solutions’ ability to seamlessly handle multiple business streams in an integrated system played a key role in the decision to buy the software.
“Our overriding goal with the new ERP system was to manage direct resources – staffing costs, equipment, and machine tools – more effectively, and Global Shop Solutions proved to be a perfect fit for the manufacturing side of the business right out of the box,” says Thomson. “It allows us to map and track work within the machine shop in real-time, enabling us to capture labor and job costing with greater accuracy. We’ve also made significant improvements in scheduling and inventory management, and know the current status of sales orders, work orders, and jobs in progress at any given time.”
Heat Treatments’ scheduling planners continue to enhance their skills with the Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS) application. In particular, they are using it to address different customer expectations, such as special exceptions on lead times. When customers request these exceptions, planners look at current and upcoming capacity and load to determine whether the company can meet the request.
In less than 18 months, Heat Treatments has improved margins and profitability in both areas of the business. Knowing the true costs of each job has allowed them to reprice much of their work with confidence while delivering better service to their manufacturing and service customers. Yet, Thomson feels the business has just begun to take advantage of all the system can do.
“After we got comfortable using the basic features of the software, we began customizing some processes and reporting using GAB and Dashboards,” he says. “Now we’re exploring the use of software integrations such as Microsoft Power BI to get good data out of the system. We also plan on rolling out TrueViews™ to make live data accessible to everyone on the shop floor.”
“Global Shop Solutions is a great tool, and we know there’s a lot more we can do with the system. We’re very pleased with the results so far, and looking forward to where it will help us go in the future.”
Fergus Thomson, General Manager at Heat Treatments Ltd
To read more and learn all the ways that ERP helped Heat Treatments Ltd improve their margins, download their full case study today.