Page 45 - MetalForming September 2017

He’s only hinting at everything that must be considered in order for Dalsin Industries to be successful. Along those lines, prior to the addition of a second location in Phoenix, the company installed an ERP system, and then replaced it with another after Phoenix came online. But what Dalsin Indus- tries had considered an ERP upgrade to better serve two company locations had instead revealed itself to be lacking in critical capabilities.
“Within a year of implementing the second ERP system, we had realized that it was not a good fit,” says Dalsin, noting that it may have been a better option for an OEM manufacturing its own product, not for a job shop dealing with a large amount of variables from quote to quote and job to job. “For example, we only could quote one quantity at a time, and being a job shop/contract manufacturer, most of our quotes involve two to five different quantities, so we ended up having to create two to five separate quotes. As a result, our sales and quoting people had to spend extra time handling the added quotes.”
That’s not all.
“We could not determine how well we were performing on a particular job,” Dalsin says. “We could not drill down to part-by-part, operation-by- operation information to determine what jobs were taking longer and what jobs were performing well.”
Benefits Across All Operations
Frustrated by the shortcomings, in 2015 Dalsin Industries opted for Epicor to meet its ERP needs. Within a year, a time period that included installation and training, the advantages of the new system became apparent. The powerful ERP capabilities touch every aspect of the organization and are too numerous to mention individually, but Dalsin described a few that especially stand out.
“We can follow a job through each operation, unlike before,” he says, describing how the ability to drill down into jobs provides Dalsin Industries with much more actionable informa-
tion at its fingertips. “That includes the production rate attained in pieces/hr. and what was quoted. If we don’t hit the quoted numbers, we know that something is wrong. Either our projected rate is too high, or our pro- duction has a problem. We then inves- tigate to make sure that the projected rate is correct—ensuring that an oper- ator did not ‘wand out’ or exit the sys- tem too early in an operation or too
late—and adjust accordingly. So we perform due diligence to make sure it is not simply a log-in/log-out issue. “From that point, we can assess other potential issues,” he continues. “We can work with operations managers and operators to explore setup and other processes and then make improvements.”
Another area where Dalsin Indus- tries benefits is through its use of the
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