The labor market grows more competitive each year while job shops across the nation face an unpredictable economy. With limited resources and budgets, how can process manufacturers of all sizes boost their bottom line? Years of research behind the scenes at metal finishing job shops have uncovered three steps to take to receive a high return on investment and proven success while mitigating risk.
Taking the first step forward can be a difficult pill to swallow, but it doesn’t have to be painful. In fact, many plants can make the change in as little as two weeks which is generally unheard of in powder coating, anodizing, galvanizing and other metal finishing environments. So let's walk through the three ways to get more out of your operations with a guaranteed ROI and improved work culture.
1. Upgrade Paper Processes to a Digital Solution
The first step in boosting profits is to uncover the data and insights within your job shop. After all, you can’t measure what you can’t see, and taking a guess at job costs is a surefire way to spring a leak in your profit margins. When was the last time you dug into how much it costs you to run one single job? The rule of thumb in job shop optimization is to evaluate routine job costs annually (at the very least).
Additionally, paper workflows are tedious, cumbersome, and costly. Worksheets get muddied and lost with the risk of human error while most environments require multiple steps to scan and print documentation for quotes and work orders. A digital solution in place to track, organize, and display critical operations analytics will provide the Midas Touch to your facility's overall success.
Not only does the back end of operations benefit from digital tools, but your sales team will also take full advantage of data accessibility as they inevitably become number ninjas with instant access to the information they need. No more digging through paper files or trying to find the right row in Excel spreadsheets to identify errors or draft up a new quote. With time and materials of each step in the process automatically tracked digitally, auto-calculated margin reports equip sales teams to eradicate the negative profit margin jobs and better understand their true costs of goods sold; raising prices wherever needed with detailed reasoning behind the increase.
2. Automate Regular Manual Processes
If you spend hours every week preparing quotes, consider using your new platform to automate this process, from estimating and creating the quote, to monitoring customer views, to the approval routing process.
If your materials provider gives you a price change, you can automatically change pricing on all parts affected with a few clicks to make sure the money you are spending is tracked and accounted for in your end cost to customers. To avoid your front office spending time taking calls from customers asking about the status of their orders, you can simply automate customer notification of part status with your platform, to eliminate this time consuming activity.
These are just a few examples of all the manual labor that can be automated to save time, streamline communications, and ultimately amaze your customers with quick responses, instant updates, and insights on their orders.
3. Optimize Profit Margins and Workflows
This is where the fun really starts to kick in! Now that you have a digital resource to pull and analyze data automatically, you are able to make better decisions instantly. With profit margin analytics you can view where quotes need to be changed, longer production runs are needed on a given part to hit desired margins, and so much more.
Now that every work order, quote, employee action, invoice, etc. is digitized, your team can be on the phone with customers, troubleshooting the quality issue from a work order months ago, and you can find every last detail about that work order in seconds to make the strongest commitment to quality—the most critical element for building a reputation and financial efficiency. These customers will notice their improved service when you are regularly providing automated updates, they are always getting deliveries early or on time, and their documentation is now so much better.
Taking a big step forward for your plant can be intimidating for everyone involved. But it doesn’t have to be difficult. To learn more about the benefits of surface finishing software, check out the blog 10 Benefits of Process Manufacturing Software. For more information about how to boost profitability in your job shop or for a complimentary optimization consultation, contact the Steelhead team at sales@gosteelhead.com.