My name is Rob Thomas, and I'm the owner and president of Anchor Bay Powder Coat, and we run our plants on Steelhead. Anchor Bay Powder Coat is a family-owned business that does powder coating, sandblasting, and liquid painting. I manage pretty much all aspects of the company but mostly spend my days on the growth of the company and sales and quoting.
Our processes have changed over the last 13 years, basically from not really even having paperwork. It was verbal—jobs would come in, I'd go talk to the guys, “Hey, let’s do this to these and that to those.” It went from that to “Oh yeah, not that,” and then we started using an Excel file to create a rudimentary work order. We did that for a little while, then we thought we needed a little more traceability than that. So, we moved on to QuickBooks, which was okay because then you could kind of integrate the invoicing into it a little bit. But then as we grew, that just really didn’t offer much in the way of processing parts.
You know, it just told you what you had to do, fine. So moving from that into Steelhead was the traceability—literally from every part, just from entering the job to every single step of the way. It’s just all in there: photographic evidence, I mean, everything. It’s just a game-changer. With me not being there physically doing the work any longer, being able to actually see what happened—that I love. You know, the guys could hand me a piece of paper in the past and say, “Oh, look at what we did,” but did you really do that? I don’t know. Now I have a picture in Steelhead, I have the data in Steelhead, and I can give that to my customers, and there’s no question. This is it. Perfect.