Testimonial
How Colourfast Boosted Efficiency by 30% with Steelhead ERP
Identity & metadata
Video title
How Colourfast Boosted Efficiency by 30% with Steelhead ERP
Customer name
Colourfast Custom Coatings
Title & company
Joseph Manzoli, President, Colourfast Custom Coatings
Marino Manzoli, Chief Operating Officer, Colourfast Corp.
Additional Colourfast team members
Marino Manzoli, Chief Operating Officer, Colourfast Corp.
Additional Colourfast team members
Date recorded
2024
Product/feature
Steelhead ERP; quoting; scheduling; work boards; inventory; reporting; customer portal; chat; maintenance; invoicing; purchase orders; time clock
One-sentence summary
Colourfast improved efficiency by roughly 30% with Steelhead by consolidating quoting, scheduling, inventory, reporting, invoicing, and shop floor visibility into one system.
Problem described
Colourfast had outgrown an older custom ERP that was becoming incompatible with modern hardware and still required separate databases, double entry, spreadsheets, and manual processes that created inefficiencies and risk of error.
Solution described
Steelhead replaced disconnected systems with an all-in-one ERP that streamlined quoting, order conversion, scheduling, inventory, reporting, maintenance, customer communication, invoicing, and real-time shop floor coordination.
Quantified outcomes
• Colourfast is over 33 years old
• Roughly 30% more efficient
• 20 to 25 color changes per day
• About 700 colors in stock
• Started discussions in 2022
• Deployed in March 2023
• Fully operational within a day
• 5 to 10 minute training session for some tasks
• 90% better compared to the prior system
• Roughly 30% more efficient
• 20 to 25 color changes per day
• About 700 colors in stock
• Started discussions in 2022
• Deployed in March 2023
• Fully operational within a day
• 5 to 10 minute training session for some tasks
• 90% better compared to the prior system
Emotional tone
Confident, detailed, enthusiastic, analytical
Full transcript
Speaker labels
Every speaker is identified inline with name, role, and company before each segment.
Timestamps
Not included for this transcript.
Key quote callouts
[QUOTE] “At least we're running 30% more efficiently based on timing saved, from everything running through Steelhead.”
[QUOTE] “There’s nothing else on the marketplace right now, in my opinion, that compares to Steelhead.”
[QUOTE] “We were fully deployed in a day.”
[QUOTE] “I haven’t used my printer in like, six months.”
[QUOTE] “There’s nothing else on the marketplace right now, in my opinion, that compares to Steelhead.”
[QUOTE] “We were fully deployed in a day.”
[QUOTE] “I haven’t used my printer in like, six months.”
Filler/redaction notes
Transcript reflects edited spoken dialogue with no timestamps added.
Transcript
Joseph Manzoli, President, Colourfast Custom Coatings
My name is Joseph Manzoli. I'm the President of Colourfast Custom Coatings. I started the company in February of 1992, so we're just over 33 years old. I came from a family of metal finishers.
My dad was in the electroplating business. He started his own company. He worked for someone, and then he started his own company back in the 60s in Toronto. So I learned the ins and outs of the process and manufacturing and all that time, his focus was on furniture.
Coincidentally, that's one of our biggest markets at Colourfast as well. It wasn't in this facility. It was a much smaller location that I started in, and also in Concord, Ontario. The majority of my business was focused on contract furniture.
And that slowly evolved. My mentor has always told me, don't put all of your eggs in one basket. When I started, it was in the middle of a deep recession in Canada. So there wasn't a lot of business out there to begin with.
But, as you know, time moved forward. I started to spread my wings. I did all the sales for the company. When I first started, I was a painter. I was the hooker on the line. I was the QC, accounts receivable and payables.
I did everything for the company. So very humble beginnings. And then, slowly, as time progressed, after the first six months, I started getting into the store fixturing industry, spreading my wings a little bit.
And that turned into contract furniture, but also institutional seating for airport seating, for example, hospital seating, all of that type of thing as opposed to just an office chair. That in turn evolved into architectural lighting.
Started getting into electrical transformer housings, a little bit of automotive. So we covered a lot of the various different markets, but outdoor patio furniture, outdoor railings and fences, it was all over the place.
And then, as time moved on, I kind of picked and chose what direction I wanted the company to follow. From day one, it was always about quality as opposed to quantity. In big part because I was forced to. My first facility, I think the line speed at max was 3.5 feet a minute.
So in technical terms, compared to what we're doing today, that's a third or a quarter of the speed of what we would be doing here. So I couldn't compete with a lot of the bigger guys. So I was forced to focus all of my attention on getting or surrounding myself with customers who weren't really big necessarily in volume, but had also had a focus on quality.
We approached Steelhead because the system that we had, although great, from the time that we started up until we started working with Steelhead, became antiquated. There were a couple of issues.
So from a technical standpoint of view, we were working off of live servers. We had a main server in our room and a lot of the software we were using was access-based software. And a lot of the new servers were not compatible.
So it was a compatibility issue between the hardware and the software. So whenever we had to, by the tail end of our cycle with that custom software, whenever we had to replace an existing workstation, for example, it became problematic because one change in the hardware would shut the whole system down.
So we were having glitches. Yeah, it was a compatibility issue. So the transition to Steelhead was a lot easier than a lot of the other off-the-shelf software ERP systems that were available to us. We realized when we started the search for a replacement that unless we went fully customized again, we wouldn't be able to retrieve or have at our fingertips the information that we were able to get from our custom software.
Steelhead has evolved to a point where it's in some areas, in most areas, at least as good as what we had and in some areas much better than what we had. So it's like having custom software at this point compared to where we were six or seven years ago.
What's really critical is to be able to get the information that Steelhead allows us to achieve. And there's nothing else on the marketplace right now, in my opinion, that I've seen anyways, that unless it's custom compares to Steelhead.
Steelhead will automatically generate a report that says, these are the sectors where you did the most work for last month. These are your top 15 customers for last month. So that resonates with me because it gives me an indication as to where the markets are going and how we're doing and who's moving, who's not, more importantly, who's not moving.
So when I see a customer who's traditionally top five, all of a sudden who's down to 12 or 13, it raises a flag for me and I'll sit down during our management review. I'm still engaged with the management review meetings. They're held monthly and we'll review things like that.
So what's happening with customer ABC? They're typically, well they had a shutdown or they lost a contract. And what does that mean to us. Do we have to replace that or where do we go from here? So it's more strategizing, analyzing, deep analysis and strategizing, but it's more of a high level conversation that I'm having with the team at this point.
Marino Manzoli, Chief Operating Officer, Colourfast Corp.
My name is Marino Manzoli. I am the Chief Operating Officer at Colourfast Corp. We're a family owned business. We've been in business for almost 35 years. We pride ourselves on our quality, our lead times, and our customer service.
So we're able to handle many, many different types of jobs. What I mean by that is different sectors. We're very adaptable and flexible. We work with the customer and we're able to kind of handle anything that's thrown at us.
So I would like to think that our adaptability is one of our most distinctive features. We do sometimes 20, 25 color changes in a day. And we have I think we're up to like 700 different colors in stock as of the end of our last fiscal year.
So we can basically handle anything. Once we decided that a new ERP system was the next move for us, I did some research. I really did most of the legwork myself, researched online, found a few companies that I approached. Steelhead was one of them. And ultimately, that's who we ended up going with.
So I think we started talking in 2022 and then we implemented, we deployed in March of 2023 right at the end of March.
Oh yeah. I mean it's exploded with growth over the past two years. The team number one has grown exponentially. And the software itself has also grown with it. And the amount of features that have been updated in the ERP software has just been great. Fantastic. So, yeah, the growth in Steelhead has been amazing. And I'm happy to see that it's chugging along.
So my use of Steelhead is mainly, my day-to-day stuff is mainly quoting. And that's, you know, the majority of my time is focused on quoting and reporting. Those are the two areas that I oversee. I also, in terms of a broader perspective, I was the one who set up the system, the software for our specific use. So I handle a lot of the, when there are updates or new features to use, I'm the one who goes in there and sorts through it and figures out how we could best apply it here at Colourfast.
So we're probably a little bit different from a lot of the other Steelhead customers where we had a preexisting ERP software in place and then we just sort of replaced it. Whereas I'm assuming most of the other Steelhead customers didn't have any ERP system at all and were just kind of using pen and paper or spreadsheets, Excel, that type of thing.
Our quoting hasn't changed much in terms of how we actually do it. In terms of formulas being used and whatnot, the software has changed, which has allowed me to. So when we used to quote in the old system, administratively, it would just be entering a part number and putting a price to it. With Steelhead I'm able to enter a part number, assign it to a specific process, upload diagrams, pictures of the parts, if there's any special requirements such as masking requirements or special hanging requirements, or A surfaces versus B surfaces. All those instructions, all that kind of stuff I can actually put right into the part number profile in Steelhead.
So that directly from the quote, they can flip it into an order. And then my operators on the shop floor can actually see all the special instructions, the hanging instructions and the masking instructions and whatnot.
So it kind of streamlines communication instead of where our old system, we had a different database for quoting than for production. So Steelhead is all one database and it streamlines it so that there's fewer miscommunications from one database to the next. It's just all one. Like I said, it's streamlined and it's very easy to use.
Double entries, double entries for sure. Because they were separate databases, we weren't able to flip a quote into an order. And when we had tried doing that, we had tried setting up macros and stuff to handle that. In terms of the actual coding itself in the software, theoretically we could do it, but in action it wasn't working the way we wanted it to.
Now with Steelhead, because everything is so streamlined, it's at the point now where our operations guys are able to reference quote numbers quite easily. Whereas in our old system, they weren't. Our customers with the new customer portal are able to go in and see all their quotes or sales orders and invoices, all that stuff. So everybody's able to see it and reference these numbers so that when they do send us purchase orders, the quote reference is on there.
They sometimes even physically attach the PDF to their email where they're sending us the purchase order. And it just sort of keeps everything streamlined so that we know, okay, this is this quote, and we can just flip it into an order and all the instructions are on there and there's no miscommunication.
Absolutely. It saves time. Yeah. The double entry is a big one. Because I have seen occasions here where my guys have, I've spent all kinds of time entering a quote and then the customer doesn't reference it, and my guys have to go in and enter it a second time. They're entering a purchase order a second time. And it's a lot of wasted time. And that's basically what we used to do with our old software all the time. So yeah, it's a huge time saver.
And because it's coming right from quoting, it's coming right from the top of the process. So if there's any special instructions or whatever, it's coming directly from the quote. It's coming directly from the top. I'm even structurally at the top of the company, so if there's any issues, they know to come right to me. It just keeps it all streamlined.
That's a great question in terms of specifics. I would say just a stab in the dark. At least we're running 30% more efficiently based on timing saved from everything running through Steelhead.
Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of aspects to that. I think the fact that we are able to see everything in real time, plan effectively, and more efficiently, it definitely helps with the execution of our process. So having the more efficient process with the software directly translates to the process on the floor as well. The more efficient software makes us able to plan and execute more efficiently.
Yeah. There's been some reports on there that really like I looked at them at first and I said, that's interesting because I never thought to track something like that. The inventory on hand was a big one. Just because it's something we focused on in our most recent fiscal year. Tracking our inventory value as a whole. And just seeing that you could do that in Steelhead natively was amazing.
Another one that was super interesting, quote win ratios. It is something we considered in the past, but having a report natively in Steelhead to see what percentage of quotes you're winning and losing is amazing. It tells you who to spend time on when you're quoting and who you can sort of not spend that much time on.
Customer churn rates and retention, all fascinating reports that we never would have thought to get custom done, are natively built into Steelhead. And then, when it comes to the dashboard for the reports, you can pin whichever reports you find to be the most important, you can create custom charts and graphs and all kinds of different stuff and have it all in one place on one page.
Just a quick glance, you know where you're at for your sales, for the day, for the month. Which process is doing how much. Everything's all in one place at a glance. And that is one of my favorite parts of Steelhead is the reporting and the dashboards for the reporting.
Yeah. So you could say that. I don't know if I would attribute that to Steelhead, but it's certainly a part of it, right? Again, it all comes down to the amount of data you have, which allows you to make business decisions moving forward along with the improvements in efficiency, time saved on administration.
Again, it just allows you to focus your efforts more on more important things, like looking at data and seeing where we're making money, where we're losing money, and focusing more on those things and going after more of those things. So, yes, the amount of data you get in the native reports in Steelhead is definitely going to help you focus more on profitable accounts.
That's one of the things I, because I used to work with Marc Madigan on reporting and that was one of the things I told him all the time, you guys got to work on your reporting. Work on your reporting. And yeah, you guys came up with this native insights. And it's been amazing. I'll be honest, I didn't expect it to be so good. And it's just exceeded all my expectations.
The work boards are a huge improvement from our old system, our old software. The work boards give visibility to everybody. So everybody on the shop floor is able to look at the work boards and know what is coming in, what has been received, and what is being processed, at which stage at any time of the day.
Our old software was very modular. So our old software would use an Excel spreadsheet to import data from the database and put it onto a spreadsheet in a list. And then we would manipulate it. And that would be our schedule. And if things had to change on the fly, it wasn't easy to do it. And then, because you're doing manual manipulation of the spreadsheet, there's higher chances of errors being made, sales being deleted by accident, wrong colors being input by accident. If they're copying and pasting cells and whatnot.
So with Steelhead, the work board is the replacement for what our spreadsheet was. And if there's any changes being made, we're in real time. Our guys get updates right away. Be it priority sequence, be it changes in color, be it changes in quantities. Everything is in real time. And I can't emphasize how important it is to have real time data.
In this industry, everything's happening so quickly. Customers always want their stuff yesterday. So when things are being, when changes are being made on the fly, it needs to be in real time. And Steelhead has been a huge proponent of that for sure.
So labels are a fantastic tool because it's a sort of in-your-face notification, so to speak, for the operators to visibly see as they're processing work orders. I'll give you examples. We use it for rush orders. We'll put a rush label on it or if there's an order that requires special masking, we will put masking required label or special packaging. And because you can make it any color you want, it's great. It just pops right out while they're looking at the work board and physically moving parts on the work boards, they can see that there are labels attached to them and it just flags it. It allows them to know, okay, hey, I need to do something special with this order.
There's several benefits. Number one, with the scheduling module and the way it works in Steelhead, you have an actual calendar view. If you set it up properly with treatment times and estimated times and all that stuff, which I know we're getting into the weeds now, but if you set it up all properly, you can see visually on a calendar when orders are going to be ready based on those estimations.
So when a customer calls and is asking when is my order going to be ready, you can visibly look at a calendar and say, it's going to be ready tomorrow at 3 p.m. based on this schedule. Additionally, with the new customer portal, customers are actually able to just log in and take a look and see what the status is on their order. It reduces the amount of calls that we get, the amount of emails that we get, frees up a lot more time for us to focus on the internal processing and operation of the company itself. So it's a huge, huge benefit for sure. Time saver.
I guess just because of how we set it up in the portal because you can sort of give customers permissions on what they can see and what they can't see. So as long as you set it up properly and you set up the permissions properly, it's fine. I haven't had any issues with that at all.
With the new scheduling module, like I said, there's a calendar view. You set up the treatment times and all that stuff. You can have estimations on when parts are going to be ready. Scheduling is extremely important. Things move very, very quickly, and we need to know where we're at, when stuff is going to be ready. Stuff changes on the fly all the time, and we need to make sure that we're staying on top of it.
So if there is an issue with a work order, like let's say there's a quantity discrepancy or we didn't receive a specific part, we couldn't find it in the plant, whatever it is, if there's something missing, something wrong, we use the chat function. And because we're able to link work orders in the chat, it's super easy. We just link the work orders, say there's missing parts here, at whoever needs to be added. And they are able to look into it with the customer.
The chat function is great too. Just in keeping with the whole real time data and the speed of the industry, the chat is real time. So when something happens, you get a notification right away. Somebody can look into it and resolve the issue immediately.
Yeah. The inventory is fantastic. For a few reasons. So if we want to compare it to my old software, we only tracked our powder inventory in our old software. Now with Steelhead, because we're able to create separate inventories for each inventory type, so to speak, we're able to track our powder. We're able to track our packaging supplies or masking supplies, even all the way down to spray gun components. We keep an inventory of that. And the more data you have, the better. You're not scrambling when a gun breaks down and you need a specific part. We know that we have it in stock. We can just grab it from our inventory and replace it.
And then the second part of the inventory that's really beneficial is it ties in with the insights. So we can see what our inventory on hand was over time. We can see when there's spikes and falls and again, the more data you have, the better you can run your company. So yeah, it's a great tool to use for sure.
It ties in with your profit and loss. So you know that let's say your purchases were high one month, but your inventory also grew. The raise in inventory value offsets the over-budget purchases. As long as you can turn that into sales, you know that you'll eventually make it back. And either way it affects the bottom line. When you're doing your year-end reporting and your inventory grew, it's an asset. So yeah, it's very valuable to track your inventory over time.
Absolutely. We originally tried depleting to work orders, and I know it's great for granularity on profit margins per work order, because we're running a conveyor line system and not individual booths with individual racking and whatnot. We're sort of on a conveyor line that needs to keep moving. We don't have time to stop and record powder depletion for every single work order that comes through because we're high volume.
What we do is we record powder depletions at the end of run. So let's say we're running a Satin Black. We're running it for three hours. There's 15 different work orders on that run. We just deplete it to the station as opposed to each individual work order. And then we've tied in a custom report that allows us to pull our powder consumption costs for the day for whatever date range we want to put in there. And it basically does a bulk calculation of how much powder was depleted versus how many sales were attributed to that specific powder for that time period. And it gives us our powder consumption costs.
But again, due to the high volume nature of our specific company, we're more worried about tracking trends and colors and as a whole, rather than individual work orders. Steelhead does give you that flexibility where you can do whatever you want. You can track each individual order if you want to, or you can track bulk runs of colors. The flexibility is there. So you can do whichever you prefer.
So we run on a sales per hour, sales per day model. So we know that in order for us to make its profit margin, we need to sell this amount of dollars per day. And then based on that, we've used those calculations to determine how much we need to sell per hour. And then we get one step more granular by determining line speed and how many pieces can fit on one load bar at a time. And based on that, we know what the cost should be in order for us to achieve our sales per hour and sales per day goals.
Again, based on our specific model, this might not apply to other companies in the industry, but the way we do it is we know that our powder consumption cost needs to be X amount. And if it's higher or lower, then we know if there is profit or loss based on that specific cost. It's a percentage of our sales.
So maintenance, how we used to track it was sort of through spreadsheets and Word documents. Manually tracking it by hand. And then scanning and uploading reports to our database, because we're ISO certified. So we need to make sure that we're maintaining the equipment as per our ISO certifications. And it's very important for us to have documentation on that.
So the great thing with Steelhead is all that documentation and procedure is in one place. Whereas for our old system, we had different documents, different spreadsheets, and sometimes it was difficult to find what needs to go where. Everything's all in one place in Steelhead. You can put your equipment in the system as well as a piece of equipment that needs to be maintained. And then you could set up recurring plans so that if you need to do something daily or weekly, monthly, yearly, whatever it is, you set it up in Steelhead and then it notifies you when it's time to complete the maintenance event.
Which is also great because we would get guys saying, yeah, I forgot to do this this weekend. With Steelhead, it notifies you and says, okay, this needs to be done. These are the steps. And then you just fill it out. What was done? Yes. No. Whatever the specifics of it are, you can set it up to whatever you need. The customization is incredible. And just the fact that you can create recurring plans that notify you when they need to be completed is a huge, huge asset to have.
Which we just recently, like within this past week, we’ve now implemented into Steelhead itself. So things like a daily pretreatment calibration test where you go in and you have to test the pH levels and the acid levels of your tanks. This is a relatively new feature in Steelhead, but we just set it up a few days ago. So it allows you to go in and record what the pH levels are, what the acid levels are. If they're within range, you can set ranges. And if it's not, it's like a pass fail type thing. And then it resets every morning. So you have to go in every morning and record and test and record the test results. And it prompts you to do it.
So yeah, that's one of those things that we just recently implemented. And I think it's fantastic to have it. It's another thing just consolidating everything all into one place. It's fantastic to have. And then you can look at the dashboard, you can see a graph of what your pH levels and your acid levels were for each tank. Everything's all in one place. It's great.
It was a little bit tricky to get set up and start using. A little bit tricky. I mean, comparatively speaking, when you're set up, it's just so much easier. There's a big time saver element there. Like I said, because everything's consolidated into one spot. And once you've done the ten minute training session, it's easy to use.
So with order entry, it can go a few ways. If you're flipping quotes into orders, it's super easy. It's literally a click of a button, and then you just confirm all the numbers and off you go. Manually entering orders is also relatively easy. I would say it only takes about a 5 to 10 minute training session to figure it all out, and then that's it.
Moving parts. I mean, that's, you know, you get shown it once or twice and you know what to do. Mistakes happen every once in a while, but they're fixable. And when it comes to shipping, super easy to use, very intuitive. Everything's right there. Yeah, it's been a very smooth deployment.
When we first signed up and we deployed, we were fully deployed after the setup. We were fully deployed in a day. So other softwares might take weeks to get everything deployed fully. But we were operational within a day.
Again, there were mistakes. Obviously there's going to be a slight learning curve, especially considering that we were used to an old system and now we're switching to a new system. So again, it might be a little bit different than Steelhead’s other customers who didn't have any systems prior to Steelhead. So it's a little bit of a different type of learning curve for us. But again, it didn't take long for them to figure it out at all.
Yeah. So we're using the time clock function for sure. Which is another huge benefit because we used to just do a manual punch clock and then we'd have to calculate everybody's hours by hand. And the timesheets is a huge time saver for that. Just the ability to have our employees clock in and clock out and it tracks the hours in Steelhead is a huge, huge time saver.
It's been rock solid. We've had no issues with it. It's super easy to just invoice through Steelhead and then it gets pushed into QuickBooks. You don't have to worry about anything. Everything's all there. You can set up your invoices the way you want to. You can email them directly with one click. You can email several invoices all at once. Again, time saver. Just little things here and there that just continuously add up to the overall time saved with Steelhead.
Having purchase orders and bills integrated in Steelhead just streamlines communication between your accounting department and your purchasing department. So let's say you cut a PO to a vendor for five different powders, and you get multiple invoices for that one purchase order. It makes it easier for your accounting department to know what's already been billed and what hasn't been billed. If they're over billing you, if they're billing you twice for something, they know right away because with the bills function, you can receive a bill directly against that line of the purchase order.
Whereas if you're using a separate accounting software, or you're not integrated with your accounting software, then your accounting department won't know if they've been double billed for something unless they do some manual investigation into it. So yeah, the bills function, huge. And yeah, purchase orders are relatively easy to use. Straightforward. I like that it pulls the inventory items information from the inventory, pricing, descriptions, all that stuff. And it makes it super easy to cut POs and send them to your vendors. You can email it directly in Steelhead, which is another great feature.
Yeah. And it just streamlines everything. It gives you sort of an overview of the work that's in the plant, where it's at. You can set up filters so that you know how much work still needs to be done or how much work needs to be shipped. Yeah. It's great. It's just like a good overview of all the work that you have in your facility.
I love the fact that you can get digital signatures. All the packing slips are saved right in the system. With our old software, we had to print out packing slips, have the customer sign it, and then if we wanted to save them, we would have to scan them into the system and put them in a database just for packing slips, which took up all kinds of hard drive space and again, takes a lot of time to scan. We're running through hundreds of packing slips in a week. Having it right in the system is a huge time saver.
Additional Colourfast Team Member
Yes. Very, very like. It's beautiful. It's the best system, it’s the best. Steelhead makes the job much easier. I'm so happy with it. Everything, like when I say that, everything lines up. There is system after system. So it can do no wrong because if you do something wrong, everything jumps out. So that's the good thing about it.
As you can see, there's no paper required. I haven’t used my printer in like six months compared before I would go through stacks every month. I use like a whole stack of paper to print schedule, but now everything is night and day compared to what we had. Even though it's new to us, every day goes by, we get more familiar with it. I would say it is like 90% better compared to what we used to do because Steelhead lets you do things in one shot. Compared to what we used to do, we had to do this and do one, two, three, we had to do five things to complete one. Now everything is just right there by the touch of a button.
Everything has been good, and that's a good thing too. If there's an issue or anything, once we reach out, it's fixed right away. Keep up the good work.
It was initially, but once you get the hang of it and with all the new updates that we have been receiving, it has gotten simpler now that it stores all the parts. If we're repeating parts because we do repeat parts from certain clients, in that case it'll just pop up, and all the data that we last processed it with, including the color and the price, it's stored in memory. So that makes it quite easy.
It is actually pretty straightforward for shipping because the way I think the software has been designed, it's easy for a layperson who's not technically very savvy and could still operate this. So basically, when the parts are stationed here and under the ready to ship section, they just make arrangements with our drivers that this stuff is supposed to be shipped to this address. And because we have our customer pages set up with the address for shipping, the packing slip gets printed out with the address. So it makes it much easier to coordinate logistics.
It's been pretty easy. Everything is here once it's shipped. So it makes it easier. I don't have to manually change a lot of stuff with invoicing because the prices and the parts that I entered during order entry, it's the same format that comes up. And it has a function where the tax is also added to it automatically. So it pretty much generates a proper full invoice. So that's been good.
So the reporting page has been really helpful with us just tracking where our progress has been throughout the day. So it's made it really easy to track if we're behind schedule or if we're actually ahead of schedule, how much sales we have generated at any given time when we just refresh the reporting page.
So that's been really helpful. And we can visually see what our targets are, how much purchases we've been making, which clients do we get the most revenue from, which has really made it streamlined to keep track of a lot of things.
Yes, it has, because it's all set. If there are any changes, they are also easily communicated through the group chat that we have here. This has also come in very handy for communication between operators for different sections. We send out all of the messages regarding production for here.
If, for example, we're processing a certain group of parts for a company and instead of 100, we are only shipping 99 parts out of those or 95 parts, and we have parts that we're short, once they go through the packaging section, the operator here will tell us that, oh, we had five parts short. In that case, I will be sending emails to our clients letting them know that your shipment was short or if they missed anything that were supposed to be sent to us.
We haven't used that function of Steelhead quite often, because when we do put stuff for quality on hold, they're usually processed again right away, especially if we're running the same color. So we will just put the part again on the conveyor line after we sand or process or whatever needs to be done for the part to be repainted. So we don't have the quality hold for a long time.
What we have been doing is we have been creating RMAs for parts that customers might send back to us. So it has also made it really simple to do all the documentation required to process those NCR or RMA parts that we get back for re-coating.
So we do have a report called reject rates, where it calculates what percentage of rework we had for that particular production day. So that's come in really handy to minimize those amounts. If it's under a certain percentage, that means we did fairly well. If it goes over the threshold, that means we need to take steps to mitigate that.
Marino Manzoli, Chief Operating Officer, Colourfast Corp.
I'm Marino Manzoli, I'm the Chief Operating Officer at Colourfast and we are powered by Steelhead.
My name is Joseph Manzoli. I'm the President of Colourfast Custom Coatings. I started the company in February of 1992, so we're just over 33 years old. I came from a family of metal finishers.
My dad was in the electroplating business. He started his own company. He worked for someone, and then he started his own company back in the 60s in Toronto. So I learned the ins and outs of the process and manufacturing and all that time, his focus was on furniture.
Coincidentally, that's one of our biggest markets at Colourfast as well. It wasn't in this facility. It was a much smaller location that I started in, and also in Concord, Ontario. The majority of my business was focused on contract furniture.
And that slowly evolved. My mentor has always told me, don't put all of your eggs in one basket. When I started, it was in the middle of a deep recession in Canada. So there wasn't a lot of business out there to begin with.
But, as you know, time moved forward. I started to spread my wings. I did all the sales for the company. When I first started, I was a painter. I was the hooker on the line. I was the QC, accounts receivable and payables.
I did everything for the company. So very humble beginnings. And then, slowly, as time progressed, after the first six months, I started getting into the store fixturing industry, spreading my wings a little bit.
And that turned into contract furniture, but also institutional seating for airport seating, for example, hospital seating, all of that type of thing as opposed to just an office chair. That in turn evolved into architectural lighting.
Started getting into electrical transformer housings, a little bit of automotive. So we covered a lot of the various different markets, but outdoor patio furniture, outdoor railings and fences, it was all over the place.
And then, as time moved on, I kind of picked and chose what direction I wanted the company to follow. From day one, it was always about quality as opposed to quantity. In big part because I was forced to. My first facility, I think the line speed at max was 3.5 feet a minute.
So in technical terms, compared to what we're doing today, that's a third or a quarter of the speed of what we would be doing here. So I couldn't compete with a lot of the bigger guys. So I was forced to focus all of my attention on getting or surrounding myself with customers who weren't really big necessarily in volume, but had also had a focus on quality.
We approached Steelhead because the system that we had, although great, from the time that we started up until we started working with Steelhead, became antiquated. There were a couple of issues.
So from a technical standpoint of view, we were working off of live servers. We had a main server in our room and a lot of the software we were using was access-based software. And a lot of the new servers were not compatible.
So it was a compatibility issue between the hardware and the software. So whenever we had to, by the tail end of our cycle with that custom software, whenever we had to replace an existing workstation, for example, it became problematic because one change in the hardware would shut the whole system down.
So we were having glitches. Yeah, it was a compatibility issue. So the transition to Steelhead was a lot easier than a lot of the other off-the-shelf software ERP systems that were available to us. We realized when we started the search for a replacement that unless we went fully customized again, we wouldn't be able to retrieve or have at our fingertips the information that we were able to get from our custom software.
Steelhead has evolved to a point where it's in some areas, in most areas, at least as good as what we had and in some areas much better than what we had. So it's like having custom software at this point compared to where we were six or seven years ago.
What's really critical is to be able to get the information that Steelhead allows us to achieve. And there's nothing else on the marketplace right now, in my opinion, that I've seen anyways, that unless it's custom compares to Steelhead.
Steelhead will automatically generate a report that says, these are the sectors where you did the most work for last month. These are your top 15 customers for last month. So that resonates with me because it gives me an indication as to where the markets are going and how we're doing and who's moving, who's not, more importantly, who's not moving.
So when I see a customer who's traditionally top five, all of a sudden who's down to 12 or 13, it raises a flag for me and I'll sit down during our management review. I'm still engaged with the management review meetings. They're held monthly and we'll review things like that.
So what's happening with customer ABC? They're typically, well they had a shutdown or they lost a contract. And what does that mean to us. Do we have to replace that or where do we go from here? So it's more strategizing, analyzing, deep analysis and strategizing, but it's more of a high level conversation that I'm having with the team at this point.
Marino Manzoli, Chief Operating Officer, Colourfast Corp.
My name is Marino Manzoli. I am the Chief Operating Officer at Colourfast Corp. We're a family owned business. We've been in business for almost 35 years. We pride ourselves on our quality, our lead times, and our customer service.
So we're able to handle many, many different types of jobs. What I mean by that is different sectors. We're very adaptable and flexible. We work with the customer and we're able to kind of handle anything that's thrown at us.
So I would like to think that our adaptability is one of our most distinctive features. We do sometimes 20, 25 color changes in a day. And we have I think we're up to like 700 different colors in stock as of the end of our last fiscal year.
So we can basically handle anything. Once we decided that a new ERP system was the next move for us, I did some research. I really did most of the legwork myself, researched online, found a few companies that I approached. Steelhead was one of them. And ultimately, that's who we ended up going with.
So I think we started talking in 2022 and then we implemented, we deployed in March of 2023 right at the end of March.
Oh yeah. I mean it's exploded with growth over the past two years. The team number one has grown exponentially. And the software itself has also grown with it. And the amount of features that have been updated in the ERP software has just been great. Fantastic. So, yeah, the growth in Steelhead has been amazing. And I'm happy to see that it's chugging along.
So my use of Steelhead is mainly, my day-to-day stuff is mainly quoting. And that's, you know, the majority of my time is focused on quoting and reporting. Those are the two areas that I oversee. I also, in terms of a broader perspective, I was the one who set up the system, the software for our specific use. So I handle a lot of the, when there are updates or new features to use, I'm the one who goes in there and sorts through it and figures out how we could best apply it here at Colourfast.
So we're probably a little bit different from a lot of the other Steelhead customers where we had a preexisting ERP software in place and then we just sort of replaced it. Whereas I'm assuming most of the other Steelhead customers didn't have any ERP system at all and were just kind of using pen and paper or spreadsheets, Excel, that type of thing.
Our quoting hasn't changed much in terms of how we actually do it. In terms of formulas being used and whatnot, the software has changed, which has allowed me to. So when we used to quote in the old system, administratively, it would just be entering a part number and putting a price to it. With Steelhead I'm able to enter a part number, assign it to a specific process, upload diagrams, pictures of the parts, if there's any special requirements such as masking requirements or special hanging requirements, or A surfaces versus B surfaces. All those instructions, all that kind of stuff I can actually put right into the part number profile in Steelhead.
So that directly from the quote, they can flip it into an order. And then my operators on the shop floor can actually see all the special instructions, the hanging instructions and the masking instructions and whatnot.
So it kind of streamlines communication instead of where our old system, we had a different database for quoting than for production. So Steelhead is all one database and it streamlines it so that there's fewer miscommunications from one database to the next. It's just all one. Like I said, it's streamlined and it's very easy to use.
Double entries, double entries for sure. Because they were separate databases, we weren't able to flip a quote into an order. And when we had tried doing that, we had tried setting up macros and stuff to handle that. In terms of the actual coding itself in the software, theoretically we could do it, but in action it wasn't working the way we wanted it to.
Now with Steelhead, because everything is so streamlined, it's at the point now where our operations guys are able to reference quote numbers quite easily. Whereas in our old system, they weren't. Our customers with the new customer portal are able to go in and see all their quotes or sales orders and invoices, all that stuff. So everybody's able to see it and reference these numbers so that when they do send us purchase orders, the quote reference is on there.
They sometimes even physically attach the PDF to their email where they're sending us the purchase order. And it just sort of keeps everything streamlined so that we know, okay, this is this quote, and we can just flip it into an order and all the instructions are on there and there's no miscommunication.
Absolutely. It saves time. Yeah. The double entry is a big one. Because I have seen occasions here where my guys have, I've spent all kinds of time entering a quote and then the customer doesn't reference it, and my guys have to go in and enter it a second time. They're entering a purchase order a second time. And it's a lot of wasted time. And that's basically what we used to do with our old software all the time. So yeah, it's a huge time saver.
And because it's coming right from quoting, it's coming right from the top of the process. So if there's any special instructions or whatever, it's coming directly from the quote. It's coming directly from the top. I'm even structurally at the top of the company, so if there's any issues, they know to come right to me. It just keeps it all streamlined.
That's a great question in terms of specifics. I would say just a stab in the dark. At least we're running 30% more efficiently based on timing saved from everything running through Steelhead.
Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of aspects to that. I think the fact that we are able to see everything in real time, plan effectively, and more efficiently, it definitely helps with the execution of our process. So having the more efficient process with the software directly translates to the process on the floor as well. The more efficient software makes us able to plan and execute more efficiently.
Yeah. There's been some reports on there that really like I looked at them at first and I said, that's interesting because I never thought to track something like that. The inventory on hand was a big one. Just because it's something we focused on in our most recent fiscal year. Tracking our inventory value as a whole. And just seeing that you could do that in Steelhead natively was amazing.
Another one that was super interesting, quote win ratios. It is something we considered in the past, but having a report natively in Steelhead to see what percentage of quotes you're winning and losing is amazing. It tells you who to spend time on when you're quoting and who you can sort of not spend that much time on.
Customer churn rates and retention, all fascinating reports that we never would have thought to get custom done, are natively built into Steelhead. And then, when it comes to the dashboard for the reports, you can pin whichever reports you find to be the most important, you can create custom charts and graphs and all kinds of different stuff and have it all in one place on one page.
Just a quick glance, you know where you're at for your sales, for the day, for the month. Which process is doing how much. Everything's all in one place at a glance. And that is one of my favorite parts of Steelhead is the reporting and the dashboards for the reporting.
Yeah. So you could say that. I don't know if I would attribute that to Steelhead, but it's certainly a part of it, right? Again, it all comes down to the amount of data you have, which allows you to make business decisions moving forward along with the improvements in efficiency, time saved on administration.
Again, it just allows you to focus your efforts more on more important things, like looking at data and seeing where we're making money, where we're losing money, and focusing more on those things and going after more of those things. So, yes, the amount of data you get in the native reports in Steelhead is definitely going to help you focus more on profitable accounts.
That's one of the things I, because I used to work with Marc Madigan on reporting and that was one of the things I told him all the time, you guys got to work on your reporting. Work on your reporting. And yeah, you guys came up with this native insights. And it's been amazing. I'll be honest, I didn't expect it to be so good. And it's just exceeded all my expectations.
The work boards are a huge improvement from our old system, our old software. The work boards give visibility to everybody. So everybody on the shop floor is able to look at the work boards and know what is coming in, what has been received, and what is being processed, at which stage at any time of the day.
Our old software was very modular. So our old software would use an Excel spreadsheet to import data from the database and put it onto a spreadsheet in a list. And then we would manipulate it. And that would be our schedule. And if things had to change on the fly, it wasn't easy to do it. And then, because you're doing manual manipulation of the spreadsheet, there's higher chances of errors being made, sales being deleted by accident, wrong colors being input by accident. If they're copying and pasting cells and whatnot.
So with Steelhead, the work board is the replacement for what our spreadsheet was. And if there's any changes being made, we're in real time. Our guys get updates right away. Be it priority sequence, be it changes in color, be it changes in quantities. Everything is in real time. And I can't emphasize how important it is to have real time data.
In this industry, everything's happening so quickly. Customers always want their stuff yesterday. So when things are being, when changes are being made on the fly, it needs to be in real time. And Steelhead has been a huge proponent of that for sure.
So labels are a fantastic tool because it's a sort of in-your-face notification, so to speak, for the operators to visibly see as they're processing work orders. I'll give you examples. We use it for rush orders. We'll put a rush label on it or if there's an order that requires special masking, we will put masking required label or special packaging. And because you can make it any color you want, it's great. It just pops right out while they're looking at the work board and physically moving parts on the work boards, they can see that there are labels attached to them and it just flags it. It allows them to know, okay, hey, I need to do something special with this order.
There's several benefits. Number one, with the scheduling module and the way it works in Steelhead, you have an actual calendar view. If you set it up properly with treatment times and estimated times and all that stuff, which I know we're getting into the weeds now, but if you set it up all properly, you can see visually on a calendar when orders are going to be ready based on those estimations.
So when a customer calls and is asking when is my order going to be ready, you can visibly look at a calendar and say, it's going to be ready tomorrow at 3 p.m. based on this schedule. Additionally, with the new customer portal, customers are actually able to just log in and take a look and see what the status is on their order. It reduces the amount of calls that we get, the amount of emails that we get, frees up a lot more time for us to focus on the internal processing and operation of the company itself. So it's a huge, huge benefit for sure. Time saver.
I guess just because of how we set it up in the portal because you can sort of give customers permissions on what they can see and what they can't see. So as long as you set it up properly and you set up the permissions properly, it's fine. I haven't had any issues with that at all.
With the new scheduling module, like I said, there's a calendar view. You set up the treatment times and all that stuff. You can have estimations on when parts are going to be ready. Scheduling is extremely important. Things move very, very quickly, and we need to know where we're at, when stuff is going to be ready. Stuff changes on the fly all the time, and we need to make sure that we're staying on top of it.
So if there is an issue with a work order, like let's say there's a quantity discrepancy or we didn't receive a specific part, we couldn't find it in the plant, whatever it is, if there's something missing, something wrong, we use the chat function. And because we're able to link work orders in the chat, it's super easy. We just link the work orders, say there's missing parts here, at whoever needs to be added. And they are able to look into it with the customer.
The chat function is great too. Just in keeping with the whole real time data and the speed of the industry, the chat is real time. So when something happens, you get a notification right away. Somebody can look into it and resolve the issue immediately.
Yeah. The inventory is fantastic. For a few reasons. So if we want to compare it to my old software, we only tracked our powder inventory in our old software. Now with Steelhead, because we're able to create separate inventories for each inventory type, so to speak, we're able to track our powder. We're able to track our packaging supplies or masking supplies, even all the way down to spray gun components. We keep an inventory of that. And the more data you have, the better. You're not scrambling when a gun breaks down and you need a specific part. We know that we have it in stock. We can just grab it from our inventory and replace it.
And then the second part of the inventory that's really beneficial is it ties in with the insights. So we can see what our inventory on hand was over time. We can see when there's spikes and falls and again, the more data you have, the better you can run your company. So yeah, it's a great tool to use for sure.
It ties in with your profit and loss. So you know that let's say your purchases were high one month, but your inventory also grew. The raise in inventory value offsets the over-budget purchases. As long as you can turn that into sales, you know that you'll eventually make it back. And either way it affects the bottom line. When you're doing your year-end reporting and your inventory grew, it's an asset. So yeah, it's very valuable to track your inventory over time.
Absolutely. We originally tried depleting to work orders, and I know it's great for granularity on profit margins per work order, because we're running a conveyor line system and not individual booths with individual racking and whatnot. We're sort of on a conveyor line that needs to keep moving. We don't have time to stop and record powder depletion for every single work order that comes through because we're high volume.
What we do is we record powder depletions at the end of run. So let's say we're running a Satin Black. We're running it for three hours. There's 15 different work orders on that run. We just deplete it to the station as opposed to each individual work order. And then we've tied in a custom report that allows us to pull our powder consumption costs for the day for whatever date range we want to put in there. And it basically does a bulk calculation of how much powder was depleted versus how many sales were attributed to that specific powder for that time period. And it gives us our powder consumption costs.
But again, due to the high volume nature of our specific company, we're more worried about tracking trends and colors and as a whole, rather than individual work orders. Steelhead does give you that flexibility where you can do whatever you want. You can track each individual order if you want to, or you can track bulk runs of colors. The flexibility is there. So you can do whichever you prefer.
So we run on a sales per hour, sales per day model. So we know that in order for us to make its profit margin, we need to sell this amount of dollars per day. And then based on that, we've used those calculations to determine how much we need to sell per hour. And then we get one step more granular by determining line speed and how many pieces can fit on one load bar at a time. And based on that, we know what the cost should be in order for us to achieve our sales per hour and sales per day goals.
Again, based on our specific model, this might not apply to other companies in the industry, but the way we do it is we know that our powder consumption cost needs to be X amount. And if it's higher or lower, then we know if there is profit or loss based on that specific cost. It's a percentage of our sales.
So maintenance, how we used to track it was sort of through spreadsheets and Word documents. Manually tracking it by hand. And then scanning and uploading reports to our database, because we're ISO certified. So we need to make sure that we're maintaining the equipment as per our ISO certifications. And it's very important for us to have documentation on that.
So the great thing with Steelhead is all that documentation and procedure is in one place. Whereas for our old system, we had different documents, different spreadsheets, and sometimes it was difficult to find what needs to go where. Everything's all in one place in Steelhead. You can put your equipment in the system as well as a piece of equipment that needs to be maintained. And then you could set up recurring plans so that if you need to do something daily or weekly, monthly, yearly, whatever it is, you set it up in Steelhead and then it notifies you when it's time to complete the maintenance event.
Which is also great because we would get guys saying, yeah, I forgot to do this this weekend. With Steelhead, it notifies you and says, okay, this needs to be done. These are the steps. And then you just fill it out. What was done? Yes. No. Whatever the specifics of it are, you can set it up to whatever you need. The customization is incredible. And just the fact that you can create recurring plans that notify you when they need to be completed is a huge, huge asset to have.
Which we just recently, like within this past week, we’ve now implemented into Steelhead itself. So things like a daily pretreatment calibration test where you go in and you have to test the pH levels and the acid levels of your tanks. This is a relatively new feature in Steelhead, but we just set it up a few days ago. So it allows you to go in and record what the pH levels are, what the acid levels are. If they're within range, you can set ranges. And if it's not, it's like a pass fail type thing. And then it resets every morning. So you have to go in every morning and record and test and record the test results. And it prompts you to do it.
So yeah, that's one of those things that we just recently implemented. And I think it's fantastic to have it. It's another thing just consolidating everything all into one place. It's fantastic to have. And then you can look at the dashboard, you can see a graph of what your pH levels and your acid levels were for each tank. Everything's all in one place. It's great.
It was a little bit tricky to get set up and start using. A little bit tricky. I mean, comparatively speaking, when you're set up, it's just so much easier. There's a big time saver element there. Like I said, because everything's consolidated into one spot. And once you've done the ten minute training session, it's easy to use.
So with order entry, it can go a few ways. If you're flipping quotes into orders, it's super easy. It's literally a click of a button, and then you just confirm all the numbers and off you go. Manually entering orders is also relatively easy. I would say it only takes about a 5 to 10 minute training session to figure it all out, and then that's it.
Moving parts. I mean, that's, you know, you get shown it once or twice and you know what to do. Mistakes happen every once in a while, but they're fixable. And when it comes to shipping, super easy to use, very intuitive. Everything's right there. Yeah, it's been a very smooth deployment.
When we first signed up and we deployed, we were fully deployed after the setup. We were fully deployed in a day. So other softwares might take weeks to get everything deployed fully. But we were operational within a day.
Again, there were mistakes. Obviously there's going to be a slight learning curve, especially considering that we were used to an old system and now we're switching to a new system. So again, it might be a little bit different than Steelhead’s other customers who didn't have any systems prior to Steelhead. So it's a little bit of a different type of learning curve for us. But again, it didn't take long for them to figure it out at all.
Yeah. So we're using the time clock function for sure. Which is another huge benefit because we used to just do a manual punch clock and then we'd have to calculate everybody's hours by hand. And the timesheets is a huge time saver for that. Just the ability to have our employees clock in and clock out and it tracks the hours in Steelhead is a huge, huge time saver.
It's been rock solid. We've had no issues with it. It's super easy to just invoice through Steelhead and then it gets pushed into QuickBooks. You don't have to worry about anything. Everything's all there. You can set up your invoices the way you want to. You can email them directly with one click. You can email several invoices all at once. Again, time saver. Just little things here and there that just continuously add up to the overall time saved with Steelhead.
Having purchase orders and bills integrated in Steelhead just streamlines communication between your accounting department and your purchasing department. So let's say you cut a PO to a vendor for five different powders, and you get multiple invoices for that one purchase order. It makes it easier for your accounting department to know what's already been billed and what hasn't been billed. If they're over billing you, if they're billing you twice for something, they know right away because with the bills function, you can receive a bill directly against that line of the purchase order.
Whereas if you're using a separate accounting software, or you're not integrated with your accounting software, then your accounting department won't know if they've been double billed for something unless they do some manual investigation into it. So yeah, the bills function, huge. And yeah, purchase orders are relatively easy to use. Straightforward. I like that it pulls the inventory items information from the inventory, pricing, descriptions, all that stuff. And it makes it super easy to cut POs and send them to your vendors. You can email it directly in Steelhead, which is another great feature.
Yeah. And it just streamlines everything. It gives you sort of an overview of the work that's in the plant, where it's at. You can set up filters so that you know how much work still needs to be done or how much work needs to be shipped. Yeah. It's great. It's just like a good overview of all the work that you have in your facility.
I love the fact that you can get digital signatures. All the packing slips are saved right in the system. With our old software, we had to print out packing slips, have the customer sign it, and then if we wanted to save them, we would have to scan them into the system and put them in a database just for packing slips, which took up all kinds of hard drive space and again, takes a lot of time to scan. We're running through hundreds of packing slips in a week. Having it right in the system is a huge time saver.
Additional Colourfast Team Member
Yes. Very, very like. It's beautiful. It's the best system, it’s the best. Steelhead makes the job much easier. I'm so happy with it. Everything, like when I say that, everything lines up. There is system after system. So it can do no wrong because if you do something wrong, everything jumps out. So that's the good thing about it.
As you can see, there's no paper required. I haven’t used my printer in like six months compared before I would go through stacks every month. I use like a whole stack of paper to print schedule, but now everything is night and day compared to what we had. Even though it's new to us, every day goes by, we get more familiar with it. I would say it is like 90% better compared to what we used to do because Steelhead lets you do things in one shot. Compared to what we used to do, we had to do this and do one, two, three, we had to do five things to complete one. Now everything is just right there by the touch of a button.
Everything has been good, and that's a good thing too. If there's an issue or anything, once we reach out, it's fixed right away. Keep up the good work.
It was initially, but once you get the hang of it and with all the new updates that we have been receiving, it has gotten simpler now that it stores all the parts. If we're repeating parts because we do repeat parts from certain clients, in that case it'll just pop up, and all the data that we last processed it with, including the color and the price, it's stored in memory. So that makes it quite easy.
It is actually pretty straightforward for shipping because the way I think the software has been designed, it's easy for a layperson who's not technically very savvy and could still operate this. So basically, when the parts are stationed here and under the ready to ship section, they just make arrangements with our drivers that this stuff is supposed to be shipped to this address. And because we have our customer pages set up with the address for shipping, the packing slip gets printed out with the address. So it makes it much easier to coordinate logistics.
It's been pretty easy. Everything is here once it's shipped. So it makes it easier. I don't have to manually change a lot of stuff with invoicing because the prices and the parts that I entered during order entry, it's the same format that comes up. And it has a function where the tax is also added to it automatically. So it pretty much generates a proper full invoice. So that's been good.
So the reporting page has been really helpful with us just tracking where our progress has been throughout the day. So it's made it really easy to track if we're behind schedule or if we're actually ahead of schedule, how much sales we have generated at any given time when we just refresh the reporting page.
So that's been really helpful. And we can visually see what our targets are, how much purchases we've been making, which clients do we get the most revenue from, which has really made it streamlined to keep track of a lot of things.
Yes, it has, because it's all set. If there are any changes, they are also easily communicated through the group chat that we have here. This has also come in very handy for communication between operators for different sections. We send out all of the messages regarding production for here.
If, for example, we're processing a certain group of parts for a company and instead of 100, we are only shipping 99 parts out of those or 95 parts, and we have parts that we're short, once they go through the packaging section, the operator here will tell us that, oh, we had five parts short. In that case, I will be sending emails to our clients letting them know that your shipment was short or if they missed anything that were supposed to be sent to us.
We haven't used that function of Steelhead quite often, because when we do put stuff for quality on hold, they're usually processed again right away, especially if we're running the same color. So we will just put the part again on the conveyor line after we sand or process or whatever needs to be done for the part to be repainted. So we don't have the quality hold for a long time.
What we have been doing is we have been creating RMAs for parts that customers might send back to us. So it has also made it really simple to do all the documentation required to process those NCR or RMA parts that we get back for re-coating.
So we do have a report called reject rates, where it calculates what percentage of rework we had for that particular production day. So that's come in really handy to minimize those amounts. If it's under a certain percentage, that means we did fairly well. If it goes over the threshold, that means we need to take steps to mitigate that.
Marino Manzoli, Chief Operating Officer, Colourfast Corp.
I'm Marino Manzoli, I'm the Chief Operating Officer at Colourfast and we are powered by Steelhead.
Taxonomy tags
Industry
Powder Coating; Manufacturing; Industrial Coating
Company size
SMB / Mid-market
Use case
Quoting; scheduling; inventory management; reporting; customer portal; invoicing; maintenance; shop floor visibility
Stage of journey
Post-purchase / Advocacy