Testimonial
Western Hard Chrome x Steelhead Technologies
Identity & metadata
Video title
Western Hard Chrome testimonial with Steelhead Technologies
Customer name
Western Hard Chrome
Title & company
From Paper to Precision — Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Date recorded
2025
Product/feature
Steelhead ERP platform — dashboards, job tracking, quality holds, NCR reporting, estimating, customer portal
Full transcript
Transcript
>> So, Western Hard Chrome is a family-owned business. We've been in operation since 1961, primarily working in the service industry for Alberta and the surrounding provinces.
>> We repair uh oil and gas equipment, utilities equipment, mining equipment, various sort of heavy industrial products.
>> Our claim to fame has been that we were one of the only organizations in the province of Alberta that could do both the application side for the hard chroming thermal sprays like HVOF or electrolless nickel processes and have the expertise to finish those parts by grinding or machining, polishing, different things like that.
>> Uh well, it's 60-year-old family business. It was uh bought by my father-in-law back in uh the uh 1960 and uh has been with the the family ever since.
>> So, when I first joined the organization, uh we were using a paper system for our day-to-day work out on the shop floor. So, work orders were done written by hand. All the tracking of information was all done by hand on those uh those work order documents as well.
>> If you wanted to see anything, it was an exercise in pulling all the paper records and then compiling it into into some sort of system like Excel to try and and get the information at what was going on. Very challenging to try and and get the information that was needed to make decisions about the business.
>> Uh when we moved into this new facility, things started to go missing and uh left and forgotten about and and so forth. So, we needed a better system to be able to track work orders that were on the floor and what was going on and so forth.
>> So, uh ability for the software to be aligned with uh metal finishing or uh polishing, grinding work that we were doing here compared to some of the other ones that were more generic and uh you know just ease of startup. It made sense to go with Steel Head. It was a it was a really easy selection once we started looking at all those criteria for what we needed the software to do.
>> So my first thing in the morning is I go through and I look at the our uh essentially I call it a business overview. So I'm looking at our sales for the past day. I'm looking at what we've got on the shop floor. Uh what's the activity looking like for all the people that are working on the shop floor.
>> So just kind of getting a pulse of what's going on in the organization. With the watchtower, I can see uh the timer dashboard so I can see what people are doing and I know where we have to focus some attention and maybe people don't have uh the tasks or they're not doing the things that they need to do.
>> I can look at incoming jobs so I can see how active we are. Right few clicks in Steelhead creates the estimate and I'm also able to send the estimate using Steelhead directly to the point of contact which is which is a good which is a big one for us.
>> So in the current system in Steelhead now when we find a problem everybody on the shop floor everybody that's an operator in the system has the ability to create a quality hold. So that raises the visibility of any kind of an issue that's happening even if it's just a question that somebody may have right and just an interpretation that needs to be made.
>> A quality hold can be put in place that registers in the dashboard for the quality team and for management as well. They can go out and they can have a look at that and help to answer that question and now you have a record that something actually happened there.
>> From that point we can create a non-conformance report. We can document the areas that it actually you know where the problem was found what we consider to be the in sort of initial initiation point of the issue and then have some way of documenting how we plan to fix it.
>> Also, we see a huge uptick in the accuracy of the information that's there because the information is now being entered in real time. We're critiquing it in real time. So, if there is something wrong, it isn't something that you now have to go back in a work order from a filing cabinet from 2 months ago and try and remember what happened and why we did something a particular way.
>> All of that information is actually in the system right at our fingertips all the time. With the help of Steelhead we can have those data live as we are progressing the repair. It also allows us to go back and look at older data in terms of NCR cost, number of reworks, and attach pictures of defects right to the work order and NCR.
>> We're just starting to see more uptick in our customers using the portal side where now they can self-serve. That is something that the customers can access and they can rely on right, which was never there before.
>> I'm seeing less calls for the status update for their job and also seeing less emails asking which or when they will see their parts back.
>> Where we're receiving a product in now takes minutes where it would have taken hours previously. Right. It used to take almost two days to just complete that task. Now the same task with Steelhead is less than 30–45 minutes. Margin is computed immediately on jobs. We can see it in real time even if jobs aren't closed. On-time delivery has gone from ~40% to over 85–100% consistently.
>> Less stress for management, faster reporting, and ability for staff to self-service their own information is a huge benefit from a stress perspective.
>> I've never had a case where Steelhead has said nope you can't have what you're you know it's always a collaboration. That's where the freedom comes for me: the ability to empower people to do their own work effectively and timely.
>> Western Hard Chrome runs on Steelhead.
>> We repair uh oil and gas equipment, utilities equipment, mining equipment, various sort of heavy industrial products.
>> Our claim to fame has been that we were one of the only organizations in the province of Alberta that could do both the application side for the hard chroming thermal sprays like HVOF or electrolless nickel processes and have the expertise to finish those parts by grinding or machining, polishing, different things like that.
>> Uh well, it's 60-year-old family business. It was uh bought by my father-in-law back in uh the uh 1960 and uh has been with the the family ever since.
>> So, when I first joined the organization, uh we were using a paper system for our day-to-day work out on the shop floor. So, work orders were done written by hand. All the tracking of information was all done by hand on those uh those work order documents as well.
>> If you wanted to see anything, it was an exercise in pulling all the paper records and then compiling it into into some sort of system like Excel to try and and get the information at what was going on. Very challenging to try and and get the information that was needed to make decisions about the business.
>> Uh when we moved into this new facility, things started to go missing and uh left and forgotten about and and so forth. So, we needed a better system to be able to track work orders that were on the floor and what was going on and so forth.
>> So, uh ability for the software to be aligned with uh metal finishing or uh polishing, grinding work that we were doing here compared to some of the other ones that were more generic and uh you know just ease of startup. It made sense to go with Steel Head. It was a it was a really easy selection once we started looking at all those criteria for what we needed the software to do.
>> So my first thing in the morning is I go through and I look at the our uh essentially I call it a business overview. So I'm looking at our sales for the past day. I'm looking at what we've got on the shop floor. Uh what's the activity looking like for all the people that are working on the shop floor.
>> So just kind of getting a pulse of what's going on in the organization. With the watchtower, I can see uh the timer dashboard so I can see what people are doing and I know where we have to focus some attention and maybe people don't have uh the tasks or they're not doing the things that they need to do.
>> I can look at incoming jobs so I can see how active we are. Right few clicks in Steelhead creates the estimate and I'm also able to send the estimate using Steelhead directly to the point of contact which is which is a good which is a big one for us.
>> So in the current system in Steelhead now when we find a problem everybody on the shop floor everybody that's an operator in the system has the ability to create a quality hold. So that raises the visibility of any kind of an issue that's happening even if it's just a question that somebody may have right and just an interpretation that needs to be made.
>> A quality hold can be put in place that registers in the dashboard for the quality team and for management as well. They can go out and they can have a look at that and help to answer that question and now you have a record that something actually happened there.
>> From that point we can create a non-conformance report. We can document the areas that it actually you know where the problem was found what we consider to be the in sort of initial initiation point of the issue and then have some way of documenting how we plan to fix it.
>> Also, we see a huge uptick in the accuracy of the information that's there because the information is now being entered in real time. We're critiquing it in real time. So, if there is something wrong, it isn't something that you now have to go back in a work order from a filing cabinet from 2 months ago and try and remember what happened and why we did something a particular way.
>> All of that information is actually in the system right at our fingertips all the time. With the help of Steelhead we can have those data live as we are progressing the repair. It also allows us to go back and look at older data in terms of NCR cost, number of reworks, and attach pictures of defects right to the work order and NCR.
>> We're just starting to see more uptick in our customers using the portal side where now they can self-serve. That is something that the customers can access and they can rely on right, which was never there before.
>> I'm seeing less calls for the status update for their job and also seeing less emails asking which or when they will see their parts back.
>> Where we're receiving a product in now takes minutes where it would have taken hours previously. Right. It used to take almost two days to just complete that task. Now the same task with Steelhead is less than 30–45 minutes. Margin is computed immediately on jobs. We can see it in real time even if jobs aren't closed. On-time delivery has gone from ~40% to over 85–100% consistently.
>> Less stress for management, faster reporting, and ability for staff to self-service their own information is a huge benefit from a stress perspective.
>> I've never had a case where Steelhead has said nope you can't have what you're you know it's always a collaboration. That's where the freedom comes for me: the ability to empower people to do their own work effectively and timely.
>> Western Hard Chrome runs on Steelhead.
Taxonomy tags
Industry
Metal finishing; Industrial repair; Manufacturing services
Company size
SMB
Use case
Shop floor management; Quality control; Work order tracking
Stage of journey
Post-purchase / Advocacy