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, 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 we that I started in, and also in Concord, Ontario. majority of my business was focused on contract furniture.
And that slowly evolved. And, I, my mentor has always told me, don't put all of your eggs in one basket. When I started, 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 move 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 a very humble beginnings. And then, you know, 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, also contract furniture, but institutional seating for, airport seating, for example, hospital seating, all of that type of thing as opposed to just an office chair, that went into a 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, was all over the place.
And then, you know, as time moved on to kind of pick, picked and chose, what direction I wanted the company to, to follow. It was from day one. It was always about quality as opposed to quantity. And in big part because I was forced to my first facility, I think the, the line speed at max was 3.5ft a minute.
So in technical terms, compared to what we're doing today is 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, you know, focus all of my attention on getting or and surrounding myself with customers who weren't really big necessarily in volume, but had also had a focus on quality.
We approach Steelhead because the system that we had, although, great, from the time that we started up until we started working from Steelhead, became antiquated. We weren't there were a couple of issues.
So from a technical standpoint of view, we were working off of live servers. We had a server, you know, main server in our room and a lot of the, software that we're it 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, you know, by the tail end of our cycle with that custom software, whenever we had to, replace an existing state 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 it 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 from the custom software.
Steelhead has evolved to a point where it's in, in some areas, in most areas at least as good as what we had in some areas much better than what we had. So, it's like having custom software at this point compared to where we were, you know, 6 or 7 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 that compares to Steelhead.
you know. So Steelhead will automatically generate a report that says, these are the sectors where you did the most work for the 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 the our Management review. I still 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 you know what does that mean to us.
Do we have to do we have to replace that or, you know, 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, My name is Marino Manzoli.
I am the Chief Operating Officer at, Colourfast Corp. you know, 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, you know, we're able to, handle many, many different types of jobs. Like, what I mean by that is different sectors. We're very adaptable. And, flexible. We work with the customer. And, 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 we do sometimes 20, 25 color changes in a day. And, you know, we can we have I think we're up to, like, 700 different colors in stock.
As of as of the end of our last fiscal year. Yeah. So, so, you know, we can basically handle anything. once we decided that a new ERP system was, you know, 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.
Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean it's exploded with growth, over the past two years. You know, the team number one has grown exponentially. And, the software itself has also grown with it. And, you know, 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, and I'm happy to see that it's, you know, 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 coding, and reporting.
Those are the two areas that I oversee. I also, you know, 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, you know, 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. Yeah. So we're probably a little bit different from a lot of the other Steelhead customers where we had a preexisting software, ERP 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 we're just kind of using like, 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 like, you know, formulas being used and, 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, you know, 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, you know, directly from the quote, they can flip it into a, into an order. And then my operators on the, 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, we actually had a different database for quoting then for production. So, Steelhead is all one database and it streamlines it so that it 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, to handle that. You know, in terms of the actual coding itself in the software, theoretically we could do it, but it was just, in, in action.
It wasn't working the way we wanted it to. Now with Steelhead, because everything is so streamlined. It's 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, with the new customer portal are able to go in and see all their quotes or, you know, 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, you know, 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 can 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 do I have seen occasions here where my guys have, like, 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 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, you know, it's coming right from quoting, it's coming right from the top of the process.
So, if there's any, any special, like I said, any special instructions or whatever, it's coming directly from the quote. It's coming directly from the top. You know, I'm even structurally, I'm at the top of the company, so if there's any issues, they know to come right to me.
And 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, you know, 30% more efficiently based on timing saved, from everything running through Steelhead.
Yeah. I mean, I think, just, 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, you know, our process.
So, having the more efficient processes, both in the software or, sorry, I should say, 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 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. You know, the inventory on hand was a big one.
Just because we, we it's something we focused on in, in our most recent fiscal year. Tracking our inventory, value as a whole. And, and, just seeing that you could do that in Steelhead natively was amazing.
Another one that was super interesting. Quote Win Ratios, you know, it is something we considered in the past, but having a report, you know, natively in Steelhead to see, you know, what percentage of quotes you're winning and losing is, is amazing.
It, you know, who to spend time on when you're quoting and who you can sort of, you know, not spend that much time on. You know, customer churn rates and retention, all, fascinating reports that we never would have thought to, you know, get custom done, are natively built into Steelhead.
And then, you know, when it comes to the dashboard for the reports, you can pin whichever reports you find to be, you know, 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, is doing how much? Everything's all in one place at a glance. And it's just like, 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, 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, you know, it allows you the amount of data you get in the native reports is Steelhead is definitely, going to help you, focus more on, on profitable accounts. that's one of the things I because I was, 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 insights, native insights. And it's been it's been amazing. I 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?
And, you know, our, our old software was very modular. So our old software would use a, an Excel spreadsheet to, import data from the database and put it onto a spreadsheet. In a, in a list. Right. And then we would manipulate it.
And that would be our, our schedule. And, you know, 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.
You know, 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 our what our spreadsheet was. And, if there's any changes being made, it's 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, you know, I, I can't emphasize how important it is to have real time data.
In, in this industry, with this industry, everything's happening so quickly. Customers always want their stuff yesterday. So when things are being, you know, 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. Yeah. So labels are fantastic tool because, it it's a sort of, like, in-your-face, notification, so to speak, for the operators to visibly see as they're processing work orders.
You know, 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, you know, masking, required label or special packaging and, it just because it's, 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's labels attached to them, and the it just flags it.
It it allows them to know, okay, hey, I need to do something special with this order. there's, several benefits. You know, number one, with, with the scheduling module and the way it works in Steelhead, you know, you have an actual calendar view.
If you set it up properly with, you know, treatment times and estimated times and all that stuff, which, you know, I know we're getting into the weeds now, but, if you set it up all properly, you can see visually, you can see on a calendar when orders are going to be ready.
Based on those estimated estimations. So when you know, when a customer calls and is asking when is it 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's, you know, 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. No. I, I guess just because of how we set it up in the portal because you can, you know, sort of give customers permissions on what they can see and what they can't see.
So, you know, as long as you set it up properly and, and you're, you know, you set up the permissions properly. It's fine. I haven't had any issues with that at all. With the new, new scheduling module.
It 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. And, you know, referencing my past statement about, timing being everything here.
Things moved 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, with a work order, like let's say there's a quantity discrepancy or, you know, 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, you know, the speed of the industry, the chat is real time. So, you know, when something happens, you get a notification right away.
Somebody can look into it and resolve the issue, like 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, you know, like inventory type, so to speak.
We're able to track our powder. We're able to track or packaging supplies or masking supplies, even all the way down to spray gun components. We keep an inventory of that. And, you know, the more data you have, the better.
You're not scrambling when, 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. You know, we can see when there's spikes and falls and you know, 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. You know, the, raise in inventory value offsets the, over budget, purchases.
As long as you can, you know, turn that into sales. You know, that you'll eventually make it back. And either way it comes, you know, 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, you know, 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 it's 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. We need to. 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 much, how many sales were, attributed to that specific powder for that time period. And it gives us our, our powder consumption costs.
But again, due to the high volume nature of, of our specific company, we're more worried, about, tracking, trends and colors and, and as a whole, rather than individual, work orders. It 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, you know, bulk runs, of colors. You can do, you know, 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, you know, 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, was sort of through, spreadsheets and word documents. Manually tracking it by hand. And then, you know, scanning and uploading reports to it to, our database, that 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, all that documentation and, and procedure is, is in one place.
Whereas for, for our old system, we had different, different documents, different spreadsheets, and, you know, sometimes it was difficult to find what needs to go where everything's all in one place in Steelhead.
You can, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, we would get guys, saying, yeah, I forgot to do this, this weekend. Right? 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 it, 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 it into Steelhead itself. So things like, 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 I think it's a relatively new feature in Steelhead, but we just set it up like I I'm not kidding. You like 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, you know, go in every morning and record and test and record the test results.
And it prompts you to do it. So. Yeah, that's, that's one of those things that we just recently implemented. And I think it's fantastic to have it. You know, it's another thing just consolidating everything all into one place.
It's 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 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, when you're set up, it's just so much easier. There's a, there's a big time saver element there.
Like I said, because everything's consolidated into one spot. And you, 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 orders, sorry.
If you're flipping quotes into orders, it's super easy. It's literally a click of a button, and then it, you know, you just confirm all the numbers and off you go. Manually entering orders is also relatively easy.
I would say it only takes about, you know, 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.
You know, mistakes happen every once in a while, but, they're fixable. And, you know, 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, 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. You know, 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 Steelheads other customers who didn't have any, any systems prior to Steelhead.
So it's, it's a little bit of a different type of learning curve for us. But you know, 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, you know, another huge benefit because we used to just do a, like 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 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 with Steelhead. Yeah. So, you know, having, purchase orders and bills integrated in Steelhead, just, streamlines communication between your accounting department and your purchasing department.
Right. So, you know, let's say you cut a post 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 don't 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 to it.
Right. So, yeah, the bills function huge. And, yeah, purchase orders are relatively easy to use. Straightforward. You you know, 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 overlook, an overview of the, work that's in the plants.
Where it's at. You can set up filters so that you know how much work is needs to be done still, or how much work needs to be shipped. You know, yeah. It's great. It's it's just like a good overview of, of all the work that you have in your facility.
love the fact that you can get digital signatures. You know, you know everything. 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.
You know, we're running through hundreds of packing slips in a week. It's it was a big that, you know, having it right in the system is a huge time saver. Yes. Very, very like. It's beautiful. It's the best system it’s the best.
Steelhead make the job much easier. I'm so happy with it. Everything like when I say that. Like everything lines up Like there is, system after system. So, like, you can be, it can do no wrong because, if you do something wrong, everything jump out.
So that's the good thing about it. Well, as you can see, like there's no paper, require, I haven’t use my printer in like, six months compared before I would go to like, stack of, every month I use, like a whole stack of paper to print schedule, but now everything is night and day.
like compared to what we had. Like, even though it's new to us? What, like every day goes by, we get more familiar with it. Like, I would say like, is like 90% better. compared to what we used to go because this, Steelhead let’s you do things in one shot, like compared to what we used to do, we have to do this.
And do one, two, three we have to do five things to complete one. Now everything is just like right there by the touch of a button. Everything has been good, and, like, that's a good thing to, like, if there's a 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's pretty. It makes it quite easy. is actually pretty straightforward, for shipping because, the way I think the software has been designed, it's like, it's easy for a layperson who's not technically very savvy, could still operate this.
So basically, when the ports 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, it's the packing slip gets printed out with the address.
So it's pretty. It makes it much easier to coordinate logistics. It's been pretty easy. Everything is everything is here once, once it's shipped. So it makes it easier. Like, I don't have to manually change a lot of stuff with invoicing because, the prices and the, and the parts that I entered during order entry, it's the same format that comes up and I don't.
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, 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? And which has really made. It's made it really 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, where we're processing a certain group of parts for a company and instead of for 100, we only we, 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, 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 it 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 and 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 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.
I'm Marino Manzoli, I'm the Chief Operating Officer at Colourfast and we are powered by Steelhead.