My name is Julian Carpenter. I'm the owner and founder of Bean Best Powder Coating and Fabrication here in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We are a specialty sheet metal solutions provider. Two and a half years ago, before Steelhead, we were organizationally a different company. The work we were doing was more custom work for individuals, smaller contract sizes, and this computer model that Steelhead has provided us has allowed us to take on larger, more complicated projects and spend less time on it.
The objective is to have a computer model of your entire operation — labor centers, the laborers, the parts, the orders, everything. I am dealing with so many components that go through so many steps. It's really become a situation where I know exactly where all of my parts are in the process, exactly how many of them I have, how many are ready to go out the door, how many need my attention, what players are working on which parts.
The model that Steelhead is providing us with allows us to, first of all, not remember much — whereas previously we had to kind of remember everything — and it has reduced our collective administrative duties to the degree that we are spending way more of our days doing our jobs, instead of doing a bunch of stuff before we are able to do our job.
I mean, my stress levels are way lower. I have worked in a lot of different manufacturing roles, and by far, working for Bean Best has been, I mean, the best experience that I've had in fabrication. It is definitely nice to have leadership that prioritizes us having good tools at our disposal.
My team is operating efficiently, and I know where we stand all the time on the work that we're doing. You know, two and a half years ago, I had no way of knowing if we made or lost money on a job. That's terrifying. And the thing is — like, you laugh — but a lot of companies operate that way. So that's stressful.
So now I know — yeah — every job that goes out the door, we're making money on, and we can look at it in individual percentage points of margin, instead of just like approximate. And I was waiting a month or two months to get some financial data back. Now it's like the next day.
Having that data — it's absolutely been valuable in making sure that we are not only making enough money to pay the people to do the job, but also to invest in all of the nice equipment and the safe environment that we work in every day. We are six weeks minimum ahead in understanding our financial situation and trends than anyone not using this type of platform.
Most of our customers are the leaders in their field, and as a result, they are very demanding — for quality, being on time, and having all of the things that bigger companies have, like tracking and very competitive pricing. And all of these things that are essentially the constituents of a more mature company.
So, in short, Steelhead has been an instrumental tool in allowing me to massively accelerate the maturing process for this company. We are Bean Best, and our plant runs on Steelhead.