Optimizing Metal Casting at Liberty Cast Products with Steelhead's ERP

So, Liberty Cast had been up and running for about ten years. I purchased them when they were smaller. We've been growing ever since. My role here is the CEO. So I’m wearing about ten different hats, but making sure things keep flowing in the way that we have.

I've always loved metal, I’ve always loved engineering. My background’s in casting, so this seemed like a very good fit. Socially, I come from a small town in northwest Indiana. Most of my friends and their family worked at the steel mills. It's tough work, they weren’t appreciated, they weren’t paid well.

So I figured I've got one shot in life, and an opportunity arose where I could try and do things my way, which was more employee-oriented instead of the typical run-of-the-mill, kind of run-people-down type shops. So both of those seemed to blend together and really created an environment here where we empower our employees in a skilled trade.

So it's not just coming in doing the same thing over and over. And not only do they learn and grow, I learn and grow with them. When I was working in Grand Rapids at Bodycoat, I was their director of quality engineering, the largest heat-treater in the world.

I heard through the grapevine, through some friends that said, “Hey, you need to check out this company in Detroit. It's right up your alley.” So I took a look at it. Sold my soul to the banks for a little bit and it ended up working out where I could make the acquisition and start implementing the things that I wanted to implement.

It was a family-owned business before. So that was a great transition for what I need to do and be able to not only implement my ideas but have a good foundation to do that.

So when I came in, it was sort of the wild, wild West. We had small papers that had the orders, order quantities, and customers. It was built out of an Excel system, and it was more or less give the paperwork to the employees on the floor and hope that it gets finished with the right quantities.

And we've seen a night-and-day difference with using Steelhead. Not only do we get the quantities correct, but we also get the deliveries correct, and get them on time. We can map out our campaigns better. So we know what our actual lead times are.

And with the employees, they have a better way of keeping track. That way, if two people are working on the same job, we know exactly how many parts are being done at any given time.

So yes, we used to use, like, a printed ticket. Which, I mean, it worked at all times, and I'm pretty sure it's working still good, working fine. The only thing is if you misprint or you lose the ticket, you're basically lost.

With the computer, you can always go back. You can always look for the parts, search for the parts, see where the part was made last time, or where the order was finished or not.

So it gives a much better tracking of all the parts we actually make.

In addition to being able to see our product flow from operation to operation, which we didn't have before, we can better pinpoint where our parts are in that process at different stages.

That's increasingly important. We need to cover lead times in manufacturing because lead times are everything in manufacturing.

For our casting department to know what molds have been completed in their operation and what's ready to pour, they don't have to rely on visually taking looks every few minutes to see, “Okay, what can I pour next? What molds are ready?”

Molders move things into casting when they're ready to go.

So then my melter can see, "I've got these parts to run."

They can easily determine “Okay, what's the most efficient way to run these?” “Which order do I want to run them?” So they can maximize their pours on a daily basis.

Best way to describe it: It really lets you know what's going on on the floor. It's very transparent.

It helps me find things a lot easier through Steelhead.

It not only gives us visibility but the feature where we can give customers access to a portal and see where their parts are in our process.

That is probably the biggest differentiator that we have over all our competition. No one has that right now.

And you know people in manufacturing hesitate when they ask, “Well, when is this going to be done?” They get an answer; you take it with a grain of salt.

We can now give them that confidence to say, “Yeah, Liberty’s telling us it will be done Friday.” I can see in process; they are at finishing; the parts that I need are in finishing.”

We can rest assured this is great.

And the other pro to that is we don't have to spend 10–20% of our day hunting down parts because we know exactly where they're at.

We have Watch Tower and we’re going to track some of our parts and specific aspects of the process.

We're able to now track our efficiency with our workers and better estimate costs based on the time that it takes.

We haven’t had that before, where quoting is more or less a gut shot of “How long do I think it's going to take?”

And now we have that clarity of, "Well, maybe right on some jobs and wrong on others, so we can better price."

And you know, there are some jobs that we’re like, “Wow, we’re really going pretty well on this job; we don’t need to worry about pricing even with inflation.” Other jobs—well yes—we need to bump this up; it's not as easy as we thought; it didn't take as much time as we thought."

Now we can better predict our workflow, what we have, what our demands are, so we can better project when we need to ramp up and when we need to reduce hours before we run into instances like, "Wow, we plowed through all this overtime; we didn’t need it," or, "Hey, we probably should’ve pushed overtime when workflow was high."

Order entry is great: To have all details needed stored centrally, especially prints, helps floor workers review products quickly.