Hi, I'm Steve Beyer, General Manager at Ad Tech Coating Solutions of Watertown, Wisconsin. Ad Tech is a coatings and finishing company that specializes in powder coating, liquid coating, e-coat, and electroless nickel plating.

At Ad Tech, our philosophy is to differentiate ourselves from our competitors, and how we do that is by partnering with our customers, working with them from the start of a project all the way through to completion. We make sure that every step of the way, they get what they need and their product is done the right way.

At Ad Tech, we're definitely committed to quality. So, we work from the beginning of the process to make sure that the product in the end is done properly. We also have a full quality team on staff that works out of our quality lab, monitoring various points within our processes, including final inspection on every single one of our lines to ensure that quality product is getting out the door. Our customers don’t have to worry about what is going to come their way.

When Ad Tech started, we began in a small individual building off of downtown Watertown. Today, we’re in a standalone building that is close to 250,000 square feet.

Before Steelhead, we were a completely paper-based system that used paper throughout the facility, from the quoting process all the way through invoicing and everything after the fact. We were doing everything manually. Each department operated differently, manually, so there was a lot of paperwork flying back and forth.

Moving into Steelhead has allowed us to serve our customers a lot better because we can actually pinpoint something. We can find something. We can look up something immediately coming out of our system rather than spending time searching and looking for that paper wherever it might be in our facility.

One of the biggest things that I’m looking forward to, that we haven’t quite stepped into yet, is the quality management side of Steelhead. Being able to tie quality directly into production and tie those things back to quotes, invoices, and specific jobs.

That connection and being able to do that all within the system is actually a great piece of the system. We haven’t stepped into that world yet, and that’s because we’re trying to make sure we’ve mastered everything else. But when we do step there, I think that’s going to be another game-changing thing for us to be able to really tie everything together the way that we feel like it should.

Growth is a big piece of what we’re shooting for, and I think that some of the foundation and some of the work we’ve been doing, including with Steelhead, is giving us that foundation to allow that growth.

I’m Steve Beyer, General Manager at Ad Tech Coating Solutions, and our plant runs on Steelhead.