Video transcript

Testimonial Precision Spray & Coatings: Boosted Profits & Streamlined Operations with Steelhead ERP
Identity & metadata
Video title Precision Spray & Coatings: Boosted Profits & Streamlined Operations with Steelhead ERP
Customer name Precision Spray & Coatings
Title & company John Jenkins, President, Precision Spray & Coatings
Dina Wing, Customer Service and Planning Manager, Precision Spray & Coatings
Ram Sethuraman, Engineering and Quality Manager, Precision Spray & Coatings
Emanuel Navarrete, Production Coordinator, Precision Spray & Coatings
Mark Cruz, QC Inspection, Precision Spray & Coatings
Jason Hawkins, Strip Department, Precision Spray & Coatings
Date recorded 2025
Product/feature Steelhead ERP; job costing; margin reporting; workboards; Watchtower; quality holds; NCRs; corrective actions; scheduling; outsourcing; inventory depletion; mobile shop floor data entry
One-sentence summary Precision Spray & Coatings uses Steelhead to drive profitability, improve decision-making, streamline scheduling and quality workflows, and give every team live visibility into work moving through the shop.
Problem described Before Steelhead, Precision Spray lacked reliable job-level cost visibility, relied on manual scheduling and fragmented processes, and struggled to track rework, quality issues, idle parts, and profitability with confidence.
Solution described Steelhead centralized operations, enabled accurate labor and margin tracking, improved scheduling and workboard visibility, simplified NCR and quality hold workflows, and gave the team real-time data to act on.
Quantified outcomes • About 100,000 ft² across operations
• Two to three hours per day saved in manual shop tracking and scheduling tasks
• One broken tablet in nine months
• 21 corrective actions in nine months versus about 9 in a year on the old system
• Parts on hold reduced from potentially one to two weeks to less than a day in some cases
Emotional tone Analytical, candid, confident, improvement-driven
Full transcript
Speaker labels Multiple speakers are identified inline where introduced in the transcript.
Timestamps Not included for this transcript.
Key quote callouts [QUOTE] “It's been a game changer for our company.”
[QUOTE] “Steelhead gave us data to be able to make decisions that increased our profit.”
[QUOTE] “Parts don't sit. They keep moving like a shark.”
[QUOTE] “It has cut my personal time on certain tasks in less than half.”
Filler/redaction notes Transcript is preserved verbatim from the text you provided, with no cleanup or rewriting.
Transcript My name is John Jenkins. I'm the President of Precision Spraying Coatings. I'm Dina Wing. My title currently is, Customer Service and Planning Manager, but I also am basically the power user for Steelhead. So I did the implementation. I run it on a day to day basis. I’m Ram Sethuraman and I’m the Engineering and Quality Manager here. and on a daily basis. I over see what the quality team does and I work on engineering project. any problem that we have, any process improvement that we have to work on and I look at feedback on what process changes we have made to see how they are going. I manage our ISO program as well so switch hats and keep moving around. We have the ISO 9001 certification for quality. My name is Emanuel Navarrete. I'm the Production Coordinator here. My name is Mark Cruz. I’m in the QC inspection area. And day to day just inspecting parts, incoming and, doing outgoing. My name is Jason Hawkins, I work in the Strip Department Precision Spray and Coatings. is one of the largest industrial coating facilities in the Southwest United States, certainly one of the largest in Texas. We do hard chrome plating and HVOF thermal spray. These are corrosion protection applications for heavy industry. Being in Houston, one of our main focuses is the oil and gas industry. Upstream, midstream. Downstream. We also touch a lot of other industrial industries as well. We touch, hydraulic repairs. For crane systems and hydraulic systems. We touch agricultural industry, we touch the plastics industry. So really a multi industrial coatings facility, being one of the largest in Houston. We have two facilities here. We have our facility here, which is our main campus. And then about two miles down the road, we have a joint venture with another company totally operating under about 100,000ft² of, plating and HVOF spray. So Precision was founded in 2010. It was actually originally a Canadian company, and that they opened up the Houston facility and moved to the operation here in 2010. It started out as HVOF, which is high velocity oxygen fuel spray. It's a way to apply carbide and other powders and industrial applications for corrosion protection. We started working on our plating license for hard chrome plating in 2013-2014, and got license in 2016. We started plating and this building that we're in right here. Which is a 45,000 square foot facility. In 2018, we opened up another 30,000 square foot facility, primarily for surface finishing, and then we entered in the joint venture in 2021, which opened up another 30,000ft² of primarily HVOF and surface finishing down the road. So in total about 100,000ft². And we've been operating in this location since 2013. Precision customers. We have a lot of repeat customers. And the reason we have repeat customers is, is loyalty and good customer service. There's a couple of different things that stand out when customers want to, you know, use a service like ours. First and foremost is quality. You know, if you don't have good quality, you're not taking care of your customers parts, and they're not getting good results from the corrosion protection that they need and whatever application they're using. The second is customer service we believe in. I come from a sales and marketing background, so I believe in human touch on the sales side. And I believe in good customer service. So a customer needs an update on where their parts are. We try and give it to them within a couple of hours, try and give them immediate feedback on any issues that we're seeing in-house that may delay delivery and customers we always have follow up phone calls to make sure they're satisfied with our service. So when you look at these these things, you kind of don't want to be competing on price. Want to be competing on your service quality. So for us it's quality and customer service. So we had an ERP, but we weren't using it properly. Prior to steelhead. We were operating in someone on the blind, on a lot of the data that I wanted to help improve the efficiency of our business and improve our bottom line. So one of the things that's unique about our company, we're not a manufacturing company. We don't make widgets and sell them. We take someone else's part and we repair it. And there's a lot of variables in the time and the amount of cost that goes into that part. So, for example, you know, one company will send in part A and it may take an hour to prep it. And it may take an hour to put the coating on it, and then a half hour to ship it. The next company sends in part B, and that may be a 40 hour process or longer. We also have multiple processes in-house. We do OD plating, we do ID plating. We do OD spray of HVOF. We have various different powders with various different cost points on each one of those powders. And because we do repairs along with coatings on new parts, those repairs have a lot of variance in the amount of repair they need. So to be able to look at your numbers just from an income statement and to be able to to digest and be able to. You know, ascertain what your most profitable products are and what your least profitable products are, and what processes you want to focus on in-house for profitability and what processes may you want to cast aside or put less money and investment into. You can't do that. Just looking at the income statement. You have to look at it on a job by job basis. We didn't have the ability to do that since we put Steelhead in it's completely upended the way we look at our business. Now with Steelhead, I can open up the program, I can click on a job. And because the guys over there have bought into the system, which is very important because the guys have bought into the system, I know exactly how many hours have been used have been worked on every single process, on every single job, from soup to nuts, from the time that it comes in here to the time that it leaves. What that gives me. Assuming that my assumptions are correct on cost per hour for each one of our processes, which is something I worked out with accounting, I can look at how much it costs us to do that job and what we charge, and where we need to put our resources to, and where we need to take resources out of. It's driven profitability, it’s driven better decision making. And honestly, it's been a game changer for our company. The interface on steelhead is so intuitive and easy, and the work the guys have to do to put the data in is so much easier. A lot of these are ERP systems. Are kind of operating a few decades late. They don't run on iPads. They don't run on phones. And the clocking in system is very manual. So they got to go walk to a, you know, a desk center that you have to set up in the shop, which cost money. They got to walk to a desk center, they got to enter in a number and then they got to walk back. Well, not only is that just begging for guys to skip a process, it also takes them away from their equipment. You know, the iPad system we have here, the guys can stay on their equipment and do it right then and there. So I know we're losing time if they've got to walk across the shop, not only are they having to enter a number in and know know find the number and find the program, enter the program, enter their names and da da da da da da. They're also talking to their buddies on the way. So increased efficiency across the board if they can just enter the job in right then and there in there on their iPad and start working on the machine. It was a massive risk. ERP implementations are disruptive, hard, and rarely go well. I've been through three different implementations and that on what I just said, hard and rarely go well was the true of all three of them. I've been here almost four years now. It'll be four years in March, John came on board, the board brought him in exactly 4 years ago and very quickly he called me. They’d had a rough 2020. They’d had a hard time with Covid with the gas prices. They didn’t have some of these additional product lines that we’ve grown over the last couple of year.s so they, they, there was a lot of disorganization pretty early on, I think started looking at other EPR solutions within 6 months of starting this role and I proposed a few different ones but nothing was really catching. John actually found Steelhead at a machine finishing conference that he went to and he brought back like a demo situation and show it to me and I was like this is perfect this is everything we need and we liked that you guys were relatively small and still growing and still working on changing stuff and improving things and willing to listen so there was a lot of flexibility and we liked that and even then it still took like I don’t know another eight months before we started implementing but I fought for this implementation for three years and I finally got it and I’m delighted. and I’m going to be honest, the implementation for Steelhead was difficult. Not necessarily because the product was difficult, but any system switch is a massive headache for a company that's in the middle of running an operation. But the reason I wanted to take that risk is because I knew that once it was up and running, we would be able to identify which processes were more efficient and making us more money, and which processes we needed to pull resources from, spend less time and focus on, and possibly even at the end of the day. You know, get out of that portion of the business. I needed to see that data. And the guys at Steelhead showed me upfront that once we did it, and if we did it properly, I would be able to have that data to be able to manage business decisions better and without that data. I really felt like this place was operating in the blind. So Dina, who's our Head of Customer Service. She generates a report and sends it to me and anything that was below our target margin is sent to me in an Excel spreadsheet, and I can look at it on a per job basis. Now, it wasn't below target margin because we had to rework it. Was it below target margin because we mispriced it, or was it below target margin because it was a part that we're just not good at and don't need to be doing anymore? It doesn't matter what the answer is. You know, I can ascertain what the answer is by looking at the parts. The important part is we get the data, you know, we get the data. You can analyze it. Steelhead is not going to tell me what decision to make, but at least I have the data. So like knowing where everything is Incredible. Stunning, wonderful. The RMAs super useful, but for me, it's mainly like how much stuff I can find in the system. That's all interrelated and what that allows us to make decisions on. So like, I think we've talked about margins before, but I mean, in fall of last year. I do a monthly like margin report for John where I go through everything. I pull all the clock hours, I pull everything that was completed that month, and I show like. Where, where? Where the losses were. And then I built it out. So it's from the entire time we've had Steelhead so we can see what customers are making us money. What part numbers specifically. And there's been, “A” price increases in various areas to make up for that. So when we notice that part number A is totally not making money, then we increase the price, either until we make money or until the customer does not want to send it to us anymore, and then we don't have to worry about that. It's allowed us to control our destiny in terms of like. Is it worthwhile to work on this part? How do we make it worthwhile? So that's been that's been huge. And our board is very interested in us improving efficiency and profitability. So it's not necessarily like more revenue. It's better revenue so Steelhead lets us do that in a fairly simple way. Any time I want to go into a meeting, and we need to talk about something that's gone wrong, that's gone right, that we need to to do something about. I don't have to go based off of A feeling that I noticed. I have the data. I have all of the data. So. It makes it a lot easier to like say, okay, here is the route that we need to take, because that's what the data says, which is amazing. What pleased me about the deployment process was how responsive everybody was. So we were given a deployment liaison. You know, back in Minnesota. You know Jordan. His team. Eventually yourself. Answered every question we had. We were on the phone whenever we needed to be. We never felt ignored. The customer service post deployments been fantastic. I thought it was great. So I got along really well with our deployment person, Jordan. I found him very easy to work with. Very responsive. I think that that, of course, depends on, you know, your own personal proclivities. I was very open. I was the one driving it. So I was of course very open to making changes, adjusting, being flexible and deciding where I needed to hold the line. Like this. No, this is important. So I was happy to do that. I was happy to be involved. And that may be a different perspective than some people who are perhaps. Involved in an implementation, but they're being forced and they're not necessarily excited about the process. And that is much harder. For everyone involved because if you don't want to participate, then you're going to get impatient. If it's not exactly the way you think it should be immediately. And like. Change management is arguably the hardest thing you can do in a company. People do not like making adjustments unless you make it very explicitly clear how it's going to benefit them. And for the most part, people here, we've managed to show them the ways in which their life is easier because we did this. But if you can't find that, then you're going to be a wall at all, at all opportunities. And then the deployment is not going to be very fun for anyone. A lot of it was. It depended on the person. So like for instance, we have, a Production Manager who he's very he has a huge amount of experience. He's been doing this for a long time. But he likes paper. He likes paper. He likes to carry around lists. He's comfortable with it. And so a lot of his buy in was based on our relationship. Like I'd built a relationship where he trusted my opinion. He was like, listen, if you want this, if you think it's going to be better, I'm going to go with you on it. But I don't like it. So he wasn't enthused, but he got he he understood why I wanted it and he was willing to trust me. And then over the last six months, I've showed him how to do a couple of things. And now that he can pull his lists and pieces of paper out of the system by himself without asking, he's very he's delighted. He's very happy about it. He has no problems with Steelhead as a concept. He's fully involved and he's ready to bring his guys in for retraining if something is wrong. So buy in for him. Was initially a matter of trust, and then over time he saw why it was useful. For other people, it was it was harder. So a lot of the order entry stuff. We're actually like we're making Customer Service an Order Entry, probably do more work than they were doing before because we make them actually like create part numbers and like put things together and be organized. Whereas before that wasn't really happening, which of course led to more quality problems. Or parts just stopping and nobody knowing what to do with them. So on in that like people saw why it was useful, but for them specifically, it was going to be more work. So that was harder once they kind of got used to the new steps. They were like, okay, this is my job. I get paid for it. It's fine. I'm cool. Then there's people like me and like John who were like, oh my goodness, data. Like love this. Absolutely on board. Super excited from the beginning. It has to. And it's not just the top though like the communication from the top. Has to be sort of pervasive and persistent. Even if the guy at the top is fully on board. If he doesn't say anything to anyone, then you're kind of screwed. Yes. I mean, I went to Minnesota to talk about the system, like I helped with the design of it. So I've been excited about it. But using it is what makes it real, and I only see benefits from the quality side of it. It's fantastic. So I been very excited. Been very excited with it. And then we as a team, as a management team, will preach the importance of the data. We have provided grades on what they're doing, what they're not doing. take this a year with. That's the language that we speak. It's been all right. It's been alright. The initial. Speed bump after the first two months was rough, but apart from that, it's been good. It's been good. I mean, you have to just do it. You have to do it. And and, important, is whenever something doesn't work, the feedback needs to be quick. You have to do it. You're going to make mistakes, and you just have to learn from it. I was, surprised that. It was a daily phone call and obviously any implementation has issues and. That feedback and fixing those seemed quick from where I stood. That was pretty surprising. And? The the cut of Jordan where it was like, hey, you're done with the implement... implementation phase, and you moved on to, sustaining customer. That was cut and dry. But that's also working okay. The support is great. The supporting teams to understand or questions. I think I think the team is skilled. And our questions are. Understood. And that's pretty nice. Whenever we wanted to do custom reports. That's one of the things that Steelhead sold us on. It's like, hey, you want to see X report? You want to see Y report? We'll make the report for you. That's come true as well. So the deployment process from a customer service standpoint, from a follow up standpoint and from a customization standpoint. Has been very positive. It was primarily Dina. I told her that this was the Pottery Barn, and if she broke it, she owned it. And, so she, she took that to heart. You know, I, you know guided her as best as I could whenever she had to make tough decisions. But I let Dina run with it. She was the person who did it. And at the end of the day, I think she did a great job. Well, I mean, you have to be direct and you have to be honest with them and you just have to say, and this is what I did for months ahead of time. Guys, we're doing this. You know, this is the date. We're doing it and we're switching it. You know, the justification for me was one I wasn't happy with our current ERP, and two, I needed more data to make better decisions. But I also, you know, brought the team in. We had a lot of leadership meetings. We do a monthly, kind of leadership meeting where we can kind of talk about things and we go through different aspects of the business. We have, you know, weekly operations meeting. But this is, you know, the the company leadership. What are we working on? What do we need help with? Da da da da da da. Steelhead was a topic months before deployment and I reiterated three facts one. It's going to be very hard and it's going to suck. and we're not going to like it. And you're going to complain. And I'm going to hear your complaints. And that's that's okay. It's okay. It's okay to complain because it's going to be hard. Two when it's finished, we're going to love it. Because it'll be a different system. It takes everybody a lot of time to get used to different systems. When your iPhone updates, people complain about that because they can't find this and it can't find that anytime something that you're used to doing on a daily basis changes. It creates negative emotions. But that's okay because it's temporary. At the end of the day, most people, I think are happy with it. There's still some kinks we're working out, but that's okay. And we're getting a lot better data. And to be honest, the margin improvement we see it's done its job. No employees gotten distracted. None have disappeared. We've broken 1 in 9 months. I don't think that's that bad. Well, we put big protectors on them. And when we put the industrial, you know, worksite protectors on them, I mean, they all got pads and buffers. We’ve only had to replace 1 in 9 months, so I think that's pretty good. They can carry around the shop. We trust the guys. Do it and do with them as they need to do. Not everyone has their own, so they're shared between stations. We think that adds a little layer of accountability. So if one comes up missing, there's five guys who all use it. I mean, come on, you know who's going to walk away with it when they know. We've got 100 employees, but there's a lot of guys that have been here for years to kind of treat each other like family. I know everyone says that, but we really do. You know, there's a lot of long term employees here who help us hold kind of some of the new guys accountable. And at the end of the day, you know that we have a charging station. They're accounted for in the charging station, but. You know what? If you have locks on them and, you know, sensors on them and all that stuff, it just for me, it shows an element of distrust. You know, we just let the guys work with them and we haven't had any issues. I've been here for four years, and, we've had one incident where an employee. You know, try to take something. And, it was just a raw material and. They came back the next day and confessed and brought it back. And I like to think that that. The positive culture here kind of wore on him. You know, it wasn't out of fear. I think it was more just kind of out of guilt. You know, we give our employees a lot of trust. Get into it. Jump into it. Start playing around on the program. Learn what you think you're good at. Figure out what you want to get out of it. Jump right into it. But the other thing I would say is, and this was important for our team, have a plan. And a reason and a purpose for why you're doing it. And I hope everyone would have that before going into it, as opposed to just well we need a new system. Have a reason for needing the new system for us. We want to know what our margins were on all these oddball parts that we're doing. You know, we have one line of business that's probably 40% of very similar parts, but the other 60% of our business is one off jobs. You know, we wanted to know what our margins were on those jobs. We wanted visualization of that. That's the reason we put in the software. So I have a reason for it. Because we were very hard on you guys and we said, we, we want another iteration of this. This isn’t what we want. No, guys, this is what we wanted. And it was a little bit of back and forth. Y'all are very responsive. Now. When I walk in, I get every report that I asked for. It took a few months, but know what you want. Know what you want. I will. I have three areas of Steelhead that I go to, and it's exactly the way that Dina and I wanted it to look. Report's, shipping. I want to know exactly how much revenue we've booked at any given moment for the month. I want to be able to search it for month going back, but for the most part, I want to see on a 30 day basis. How much revenue we booked. I want to see how much revenue we’ve shipped. I want to see what's arrived that day in incoming. And I want to look at the Watchtower. And I love the Watchtower. You know, Watchtower tells me everything that's in house right now so I can break down. You know how many parts we have an ID? How many parts do we have in OD? Because every Monday morning we have a Sales meeting. And I can tell those guys, guys, we're running low on ID, we’re running low on this, we’re run low on that. Have too much of this, lead times are out on this. You know, that was all in Excel prior to because the ERP didn't really tell us. It gave us dollar figures of backlog. It didn't tell us what. The dollar figure in this business doesn't tell you anything. You know, you can have a $5,000 coating job that takes ten minutes. You can have $1,000 coding job that takes ten hours. You know, different business, different businesses, all the all over the dollar amount don’t tell me anything. I need to see what the parts are. I need to see what's in WIP, where it is in WIP. And is it almost done? Is it at finish? If it's at finish, we need to get more WIP in. If we have a large amount of parts that are staged, you know, pre WIP, you know, then we need to let our customers know the lead times for kicking up. We use all of that and it all gets discussed in our sales meetings as we go out and touch customers and tell them what expectations are. They want to send us something for repair. In terms of like reports that are in the system. I'm not necessarily talking insights because I feel like it's it's pretty like. Everyone knows why those are interesting and those are useful, but there's a couple of CSV files that are so important to the way that we work. One of them is. Under the, like, there's the Timer Dashboard. There's a CSV file you can pull of, a span of time's clock ins for specific employees or all employees. If you take the comma out of the two date fields, you can subtract them and get. A normal number for duration. Then you can say, okay, this employee has been clocked in for 36 out of 40 hours. Fine. This employee has been clocked in for 20 out of 40 hours. What is he doing? It's been it's been huge. And it also helps with the the margins to make sure we catch things like people forgetting to clock out. And I can see something where someone's worked on something for 24 hours like, no you haven't. And I grade them. I send out a report every month to to every. To all the managers. I'm like, so, this department has an 80% error rate on clock ins. These are your worst offenders. Let's talk to them. They hate me. It's great. But it fixes a lot of problems. So we had a situation. Where they were, misunderstanding what they were, what kind of what time they were tracking. So dwell time already. It automatically gets tracked. But what we want to see in our margin is labor time. Hands on time. So it's not necessarily how long the part was in the carbide strip tank. It's how much time was the man touching it? Like cleaning it. Prepping it, turning it. Unloading it. Moving whatever. So they were perpetually doing ten hours. I'm like, no. And I explained it, and I explained it, and I explained it, and I explained it. And then finally we brought everybody in and did a whole, like, corrective training. But I've been sort of spot checking and it's been like a 90% improvement in and then tracking the thing that we want them to track. So it's good. And it also means that when I go to check margins, those margins are accurate. So it's good for catching mistakes. I love that report. Pulling stuff out of the watchtower. We send like weekly backlogs to our customers. That's like a list of all their parts and an update on ETAs. So normally those ETAs will just be the original deadline. But in cases where something needs rework or, something, we had to slow down because a machine went down, whatever, any, any number of reasons we can update them on like a new ETA. And that is so much easier now because I just press a CSV button, and the only thing I have to worry about is what what date should be. So it takes like an hour and a half rather than four. Those are just my ones. Those have been very useful for me. One of the more recent ones that I've been working on is getting customer churn as one of our, like, KPIs that we track. Because I think it's just it's useful. That customer churn report is it's it makes sense. It's easy to read. I know exactly what I'm looking at and it's easy to explain. Did you ever have customers calling you specifically to see where something's at? Everyday. What was that like pre-Steelhead? I had to ask somebody else. And then what were they doing to find the answer for you? Running out in the shop looking for it. So if you were to put a number on how much time that it would take, what would your guess be? depends on where it was in the shop. Five minutes to an hour. And like today, if you have a customer call. What benefits do you have with Steelhead? If I'm at my desk, I can tell them on the spot. All I have to do is just search their name in Steelhead and it pops up. And I can tell exactly where in our process their part is. Production uses the workboards. You know, Dina manages the scheduling. So every single one of our processes, especially on the final side, they use workboards to know what they're supposed to work on next. We have total continuity on what everyone is working on at any given time, and everyone follows the same set of instructions, they pull their next order from the work board. We used to have a lot of, hey, this guy needs his part. Hey, you know, he needs his part. Shuffle the parts based on who's screaming the loudest. We don't do that anymore. You know, we we we, we use the workboards, so production don’t have to worry and say, hey, which work or am I grabbing next? da da da, da da da. It's quiet. They look at their, they look at their iPad, they pull up the work board and say that's what I'm doing next. They go to work. I’ve been here for about 11 years. I look at due dates. See what's coming up. Push it forward. Look at Steelhead see what's on the schedule. Try to push that ahead, let Dina know if there's any hiccups or Due dates we're not going to accomplish. And if there's any issues as far as, you know, things we can't mount. Specs that, prints that we don't have that go along with the part. Put them on hold using Steelhead. My majority, half of the day I'm doing weld at inspection. Once I started to press play, move it to weld inspection and I, you know, mark up the part. Move on Steelhead Move it over to waiting for approval. Once it is approved, customer service will move it to ready for prep. They’ll notify us. We'll find it, stage it Bring it to the welder and let him do his thing. Weld it and then he moves it along the next step as well. For the most part, I think everybody's pretty good at it. I like it. Most of them like it too. We can actually see where things are, Compared to our old, system we had. Once things got reworked, we lost track of it, so it's easy for myself at least, to do my job when people want an update and I don't know where it is physically, I put it in there and it gives me a general idea of where it is. Tells me it's been reworked. It should be there. There. So it helps me a lot. So the old system didn't have that capability. to see comments, see notes. See incoming specs sizes, print sizes. It's all on there. Yes. No more guessing. Yes, it's on there. And if we do move the part without, you know, we do move a part It's in the wrong section. It’s really on the operator. No more. He said, she said, it's. It's the law on there. or however you want to say, this is the rules. I mean, this is what's going to happen, you know, it it has helped us. Point blank. No more guessing. And if they're not following that, the next step then that's on them is no longer on myself or Dina or anybody else. I mean, it's on there. My job is to chemically strip mud rotors used for drilling. Using it, hand on, I mean I'm a person, that I'm not too good learning by instruction. I have to do it a few times to to learn it. I was just kind of cut loose with it in the beginning. I kind of learned it over 2 or 3 days of just playing with it. Yeah, it's it's relatively easy. I just, Go on. I type in the work order. The part that I'm working on comes up. I pause it Like I say, I hit play if I'm actually prepping the part or getting the parts off the, racks. And then once I actually have them in the tank, then I'll pause it until they're stripped and come out of the tank, and then I'll move it to the next station. Not as much paperwork. I mean. Yeah. That that's the that's the easy part. It's, Steelhead is real easy for me to use. Oh the schedule as a living, breathing, chaotic document. It was a forever project there, There was no time I could put on scheduling. It was just a constantly moving part of disarray of lines and an Excel spreadsheet that we would hope people would follow. I had two employees who worked full time who probably spent half their time doing it, which was unfortunate because that's not what they're supposed to be doing. It hasn't eliminated it, but it's put it down to one person. Dina And, she manages the work boards, and she can do it in about half the time. She did it last time. So if we had two people that were doing doing it for half their day. And now we have one who does in about a quarter of their day. It's, you know, some substantial time savings. She still does the planning. I mean, you still have to put the. You still have to put the parts in the work board. I mean, it's not, you know, and there's still stuff you have to move around. You get phone calls, you get, you know, customers themselves will say, hey, I know I sent that in four weeks ago, and I know this one just got here a week ago, but I want this one first. I mean, customers will call you and do that. You got a list of them, You’ve got to You got to do what they want. So they still there's still a lot of manual manipulation and the schedule. But. The ease of doing that, it’s a lot easier. It's been a huge improvement. It has cut my personal like. Time on certain tasks in less than half. Some things I don't even have to do at all anymore. It's incredible. With JobBoss I used to have to. Basically manually schedule the entire shop. Because trying to do it in the system was extremely difficult. So I had an Excel spreadsheet, and every morning I would spend two hours pulling every single clock in that anyone had done in the previous 24 hours, updating the parts and where they were, and seeing if that would affect dates, if something needed to get reworked, if something was going to be late and we needed to notify the customers. And I did that every day. That two hours. I don't have to do that anymore. Because with the Watchtower, I literally just go. I pull the CSV file. Everything is there. Everything is updated. And it's live. So they're always in the right place. I mean, always is a strong word, but 99% of the time they're in the right place. And that's just one thing. It's been a huge improvement. I used to spend two hours a day. Manually keeping track of where every item in the shop was. And it was a massive time sync, and I was wrong a lot of the time, and I didn't I couldn't react fast enough. And I would print out, like giant lists every day and hand them out to all the leads to be like, these are the These are the things you need to work on today. And then if they couldn't find one of those parts, they'd do something else and the list would become immediately useless. hours, hours a day, every day ... 2 or 3 hours every day. So now any time somebody needs some sort of, hey, I need to reprioritize this. Hey, can you tell me where this part is? I have up to the minute. Immediate data. I can even, I can tell people, oh yes, “A” it is up on a final polisher. So it should be done today. “B” they've been working on it for six hours already. It should take about eight. So you can probably tell your customer to come pick up in another three hours given time for QC. Like there is a chance that we don't pass it at final inspection, but it's a pretty good shot that if a truck shows up, we'll be ready to load it. And that. That's huge. It also allows sales to go look for that themselves. Which not all of them are willing to do, but some of them do. And that means I have to answer less questions. So that's great because I do functionally all the planning for this shop as well. Which is very much a first in, first out kind of situation, unless we have hot parts or reworks. But. There is also speaking of first in, first out. Unless we have hot parts or reworks the label system where you can set all the work boards to queue things. By label priority. I love that because that means that yes, there's there's by deadline date, but if anything needs to go fast, fast, super fast. All I have to do is label it hot and it will move twice as fast as everything else. I don't have to say anything. I don't have to do anything. I just label it and it will happen automatically. Well, there's, there's, like a button on the top. Left of the work boards where you can say order by label priority and you can set your label priorities per work board. So if you say okay, if something is labeled as a rework, it needs to go to the top of every priority list, no matter what the deadline is. If something has a label that says hot, it needs to go right behind. Reworks no matter what the label is. If something is, we can we can prioritize stuff too. So it's like if you don't have anything else to do, work on this. And even for the guys out on the shop floor, because the location's actually like our current. If we say, yeah, that part is queued for Chrome. They know where to go. Look for it. It's going to be over in this building. Queued for Chrome. Whereas before. People didn't move stuff and they were really bad at clocking into and out of things. So. Half the time I'd say like ready for final polish, but the part was nowhere to be found. So it's saved time out on the shop floor for the leads as well, because it's easier to find stuff. I use it. On a one off basis, like it's not something I do every day. I'm not trying to prioritize things all the time, but if we have a bunch of parts all come in and all of them are high priority, and everyone is sort of like confused about what needs to happen first. Instead of letting the deadlines and the label priorities handle it, I will go in and manually make them a priority list. And in addition, I will print that list out. So they have in Steelhead, it's going to go to the top in order of the way that we decided it would. And then they also have a physical document, which happily, prioritization does spit out so I don't have to do double the work. But that it's situational. It's when there's too many competing, high priority things happening all at once. 90% of the time. That label priority thing does all the work we needed to do. You have a great product. The customization that you've leaned into and the ability for customers to. Manipulate the software for their needs, I found tremendous. It's not. You know, Steelhead didn't make it more profitable. Steelhead gave us data to be able to make decisions that increased our profit. If you deploy Steelhead, it's not going to make you more profitable. If you if you use Steelhead properly and know what reports to get out of it. And make smart decisions and act on the data they give you. It can make you more profitable. Well. And if you want to be, you know, I don’t want to say hard headed. But I mean, if you look at a product line that you're emotionally tied to and it's killing your business. But. You know. Well, but we like doing this and we like those guy as well, you know. That's fine. Maybe you don't want to change, but. You know, from my standpoint, if there's something that's not working, we have to go back to the customer, we either raise the price or tell the customer to go find another vendor. And those aren't easy conversations. I get it. But at the end of the day, you got to do right by your employees. We had a couple of customers sending us things that we had a hunch we were losing money on, but now we have raw data to show them. And we tell him we have the data. We tell them we'll sell them the ERP report. We tell them, look, guys, this is a fourteen and half hour job. It's not a six hour job. We’ve got to raise your price. It's not an easy conversation, but at least we have the data to back it up. We've walked away from three or four customers because of Steelhead and I don't mean that in a negative way. I just mean that. Hey, look, guys, we love you. You have to go find another vendor. We can't afford it. So again, back to my. Has it made you more profitable? Us? Yes. Not everyone is going to have going to want to have that conversation with our customer. Some people are emotionally tied to Customers. Some people, like in sales, are motivated by commissions and don't want to give up that particular customer. I mean, there's a whole slew of reasons why you wouldn't make the decision we made, but we just decided to be aggressive on profit and just said, look, I mean, there's just some things we're just not going to do anymore. So it has made us more profitable. But the software didn't make us more profitable. the data, the software gave us a lot of us to make decisions that made us more profit. Key distinction. if your not going to use the data it gives you, what is the point of switching? It's been incremental. It's gotten, you know, the first couple of months we've probably lost money because of the deployment and trying to find stuff. The last couple of months, we've only had it for nine months. The last couple of months we've seen incremental increase and now we’re above our baseline prior to Steelhead. So I'll leave it at that. I mean, the quality system and tracking that I don't. We weren't even doing that. That wasn't a thing. We weren't tracking cost of per quality. We weren't. Properly doing rework orders. We were just kind of like moving parts back in their process and hoping for the best. So there was no way to know how many times something had been reworked. Have we created a bigger problem by reworking it three times? So being able to track that means we can keep an eye on it and stop it from happening. which has been amazing. Because our guys are they're very independent. They know their jobs and their parts and what they're doing pretty well. So they can tell if something is not going to be workable and pre-Steelhead they used to just move with it. We had a couple of little like programs that we started to try and maintain, like a handle, so everyone involved would know that they were doing that. But it wasn't until Steelhead and the quality hold process that it became easy for them. To put it on hold, explain it to someone, it would freeze everything and then we would go from there like that was huge. There's a lot of this stuff that has like this side benefit of if we get audited. It's easy to find out what happened so ISO audits, which we haven't had one yet. so ISO audits, which we haven't had one yet. We'll have one in April, but we've had customer audits and Every time the customer is like, well, and what heat number did you use on this? And you just kind of click through a couple of times and it's there, the data is there. They use this. They had this spec, they put this many pounds on it at this temperature. It's all there, which is amazing. So it makes auditing really easy. I had a customer there finding for our JV was that they didn't have Steelhead, which is the main reason we pushed the implementation for that location was to make sure that when they came back for their recertification, they would have that because The customer in question. Is a large company, right? They had recently done like an SAP implementation. And during their audit, Ram asked me to show him how to find something in Steelhead and it ended up being like a 30 minute like tour of the software. I was being your salesperson, basically, and they were like, the engineer was like, face in his hands, like, we spent $2 billion and we can't do this. Kind of thing, which. I've been learning a lot about SAP as a software and it is wild. How many companies spend Bazillions of dollars, Almost literally. And they fail at the implementations. Fail time and again. They just fail. I mean, compared to how easy it was to get Steelhead in here that's huge. It was very paper form heavy, and we did not have a closed loop system for that feedback. If there is an NCR, if there is a problem with the part, we’d make, a form will fill it. What happens after that is anybody's guess, right? So if I have to understand the effect that non conformance is having on lead time, or rework cost, I was in the blind. So if I have to go ahead and get the data, dig the data out and see what changes we have to make. Understand if it worked or not. I was always on the blind. The system that. We had was cumbersome. So we created a paper system that was supposed to be easier. But that was not the case. So NCRs were stored. The data was transferred into an Excel spreadsheet. That's it. Cars were stored in another database. It's a soft It's a database that has. Document control. It has a quality module. It's not a, It's not a system like how Steelhead is not Internet based. It's a desktop based application, and that's the way we had it. Steelhead has completely streamlined what happens on the floor. It's a combination of. We designed the NCR. In Steelhead based on what the paper said. So the NCRs on Steelhead mirror what was actually happening on the floor. But it gives us the opportunity to provide a disposition. Create a rework loop and let the part go. Previously. Paper NCRs were handled by one person. Disposition was handled by another set of people. Recording the NCR was a separate Value stream and then creating a rework instruction was a different system. So those are all gone. So now the process is streamlined. So we know that if there is a non conformance we know what to do. We know that you have to go ahead and find the root cause. Make the disposition. Go ahead and create the rework loop and continue with the work as it goes. So the system is sleek. It's not cumbersome anymore. It makes. Me and my team want to interact with it much quicker so when you take that friction away. I get more information, I can work on more real problems, then fake problems and, I can document problems that customers are sending me. I didn't do it previously. Now I know it's easier. So we have another stream and process for that. So. My. Time involvement on NCRs, dispositions and rework has gone up. Only because it is the true information. The data that I have is true. I can rely on it. I can do different things with it Previously we just had a data dump. I did not do much with it. But that's not the way to run a business. So we're getting better on a daily basis because we use Steelhead Even though on the front end. The time reduction is not obvious, but on the backend where my process is improving, that's where I value Steelhead. Two completely. Independent systems have been eliminated, so nobody has to remember to use those systems. Nobody has to type the same information twice. My goal is the throughput on decision making. The truth behind the data. That is my goal as a quality manager, right? So before Amazon. You wouldn't go to an unnamed website to go buy something. Amazon, the website so easy, so slick. Anybody can go ahead and buy it. So once you take that friction off now everybody wants to go to Amazon to buy stuff. And so everybody needs something that’s easy. So to create a culture where yes if there's a non conformance you have to document it because we're going to get better to create that culture. Steelhead has been phenomenally instrumental. That's where I believe the power of Steelhead is. A part would come in and quality would provide instructions on what needs to be taken care of. The second system would create a work order, and we would go ahead and process the part and send it. That's it. The information that we missed. We didn't document. That a customer sent a part back. So if a customer is really unhappy and they come back and go to my boss and say, we've had six NCRs last year, man, what did you do? And if he came and asked me Ram, what are the NCRs? I was in the blind because I was left out of the equation because there was no reason to solve those problems. QC Inspection, inspected the part gave instructions to somebody else. They went ahead and did it, and then the part went out. So there is no chance that we are going to get better. Right. So that was the problem with the previous method. And that's what we did before Steelhead. That's what we did before Steelhead. We just. Did it. Customer tracking it, I'm not. Previously, when a part went on hold, the operator would take the part off, write a paper NCR, and move the part to a location, MRB location so that's the visual and that's it. There was no other electronic trigger. If People who are interested in that particular job are not walking by the part. That part can sit there for weeks. So that was painful. As a quality manager, I am not responsible for the part getting delivered to the customer. I have enough on my plate. I’m working on it so parts that are on hold usually went on the back burner very quickly. So parts sat there so that was not goodv with Steelhead there's visibility. That's the best part. The physical process is still the same. Stop the process. Put the part on hold. Move the part to the location. That's it. But now there is the customer service team. There is the management team. There's a quality team. Everybody has a board that says these are the parts that are on hold. Even though it's not my responsibility to get the parts off to the customer. Somebody else is like, hey, what's going on? Why have we not moved it? So now it creates the domino saying that, oh parts are on hold. Let's go ahead and see what's going on and make a disposition get the part moving. The throughput of parts that go to the MRB have increased drastically. and that's the power of quality holds in Steelhead. It's always about the throughput. And you can document it so the speed of a part hitting Hold. To it exiting the hold. Right. So that lead time could be a week, two weeks prior to Steelhead. That lead time is less than a day now. Right. So when you add that to the number of parts that go on hold, you are effectively improving the on time delivery for the company. Just by doing the right things. In terms of custom reports the Idle parts report that you guys made for us. Incredible. We have a meeting twice a week. Where we go through anything that hasn't moved, in more than 3 or 4 days. And why? So if we start noticing bottlenecks, is there is there need for overtime in that area? If there if everything is moving quickly, maybe we don't work the weekend. that's been really important because it means that parts don't get. Our shop is quite large and there are upwards of 450 active work orders at any given moment many of those with multiple parts on them so there's a lot of things moving around. And if something gets put off to the side pre Steelhead, it would stay there. For. Who knows how long until somebody asked a question. And now we sort of if something hasn't moved, there's a trigger. There's always like, okay, it still hasn't moved. We talked about this four days ago. What's going on? That makes it a lot easier. They've increased efficiency, and we've stopped upsetting our customers because this one part got set to the side because of some issue that nobody brought up. And it stayed. And until it gather dust, we don't have that problem anymore. We stay on things. Which is. That's been huge. I mean, I would say 100%. I would say 100%. It's a combination of being consistent with working on corrective actions and a system that is easy to access, which has all the information that we need. So. The old system. We used it for a year. The maximum number of corrective actions where like nine. Steelhead we've had for nine months. We have 21 corrective actions, right.. Just the culture of creating corrective actions. And working on them is brand new for us. We tell. Within our organization and to our customers. We're not a mature ISO organization. We are still evolving. We are still growing and corrective actions and getting continuous improvement through corrective actions is key to mature. In the quality realm. And, that's why I think we are 100% better. Compared to what we used to do. Steelhead has given us. The chance to hold people accountable. As a quality manager. I am the judge and the jury on that system. But internally, I have somebody else as my accountability partner, and I can let them tell me that, oh, hey, these corrective actions are hanging out. Why haven't you finished it? Right. Because everybody's using the same system. Everybody's using the system. With different modules, but. all the pages look the same there is not training that you need to go learn a module, it’s easy. so the ease of which we can access the data. Helps in the whole. Scheme of things. Now that's why I think it's 100% better on corrective actions. We have eliminated typing up the same information twice. We needed an extra pair of hands to create certs, right. my team would complain that this is an admin operation. and it needs to be done by somebody else and not us. so that’s what we did, we actually had somebody else do the certs for every job. Right now that’s gone. So we don't have this additional person creating certs, all certs are standard, right. Information is keyed in once and then we get the data out of it and, it's stored. You can access it anytime you want. So we have eliminated. Typing twice. Eliminated errors, eliminated the time manual time that somebody else needed to work on. So it's it's faster. It's cleaner. And. It's documented. I can get to it whenever I want. That's it. I like it. I was the Customer Service Manager, Shipping and Purchasing Manager for another company, a public company. and then I did Six Sigma lean for them so I did all of that for about 15 years. On the quality side, it was always manual. Oracle did not have the quality management or we didn't use it. It was always tough. It was always manual. That's all we had. I like Steelhead better. The access is great. The access to design changes, new revisions on things is fantastic. I don't think we had that with Oracle. So I work for a large public company, 3000 people. So internally we had Oracle Consultants. So you have to go through them. And then when you have to make a change it has to be for the entire organization. So change didn't happen quickly. But we're a small organization and change happens pretty quickly. and Steelhead has been very responsive So I like that. When I first got here, they had a spreadsheet, but that spreadsheet was only like two parts from X customer on this date. So there was no serialization. So parts got lost. Like the paperwork didn't come through in the right way. And then the incoming inspection team would they would they would do their paperwork, which they still do that paperwork because everyone likes it and it makes sense to all the shop guys. So I'm like, okay, it makes you comfortable. Keep it. But they would do it. And it's but it's a piece of paper. So if it doesn't get to the right desk. It's gone forever. So, now we make them upload it, which is a huge plus. But receiving now. I really like the way that we have it in Steelhead, because the tracking in terms of when it arrived, what happened to it, who touched it, what stage is it in? It is very detailed. And there's no like losing parts. It's not a it's not a thing that happens. I mean the QC inspection area. And day to day just inspecting parts, incoming and outgoing. But now, with Steelhead as it comes in, I feel like it's it's a lot. Everything runs a little bit smoother. I just take my data and put it inside Steelhead and it's you know, prop downs and I just put my dimensions. Put my notes. What I see on the parts and, I've, I've actually liked it, you know, since I've come back. I’ll go into the receiving, the receiving tab and then look for the parts as shipping, you know, puts them inside Steelhead and then I'll look for the parts, you know, as they come in, as they come in. Oh, yeah. So like the QC guys, they don't, they don't worry about parts unless they're, they have the yellow label so they can uncluttered what they're looking at. And just look at the things that need their attention. For order entry, they can only search for things that are green because that's the only thing that they should be touching. And then when I go in and I wonder, well, why are all these parts still and receiving what's going on? And I see a bunch of it's pending customer disposition, I can go in and look at that list and just follow up with every customer. Until we get the answer that we need so that parts don't sit. That is the main benefit that we've seen from Steelhead. Parts don't sit. They keep moving like a shark. Because the minute something stops. It always becomes a problem. So we have to keep stuff moving. It's me. The call is coming from inside the house. Which is in this one case, it's better if the call is coming from inside the house. Yes, so basically I’ll put the, the label, ready for inspect. No, it's a green label says inspection complete or something like that. And then I turned in the paperwork to, the person that's going to, write up the work orders. Yes, for the most part, you know, for any damages or, you know, anything, anything out of the ordinary that comes in. I'll take a, snap a picture of it, you know, I'll receive it in, put my notes in it after I'm done with it and I'll take a picture of the, of the product. You know, for any, any defects. It wasn't too bad. I’m basically, more like a show me one time and then I’ll capture it and keep on going. I do make mistakes every once in a while but when I do make a mistake I’ll get with Dina, and you know, to correct it and get it, you know, keep the process going through Yeah, but was it hard? No, it was not hard. Oh, I feel like the buttons are all in good spots. No. No hesitation. No struggle. I mean, I've liked it the way it's set up at the moment. I've basically, I'll go in there and I'll play with it and in, you know, mess with things without saving, but trying to, you know, try to figure little things out here and there. But training. There really wasn't much training. It was just a day by day and kind of figuring things out. On the back end, you know, I'll receive the part. I'll have a little work order, the work ordered, the sheet, and basically, I just inspect the parts and, on that sheet, write down my dimensions. You know, the diameter, the thickness the RA and the length of the part. I'll put it on that sheet, and then I'll go into the office after a while after I get so many done, I'll go in the office and then I'll put all the info and Steelhead and create the certs And then, you know, move it to to the next operation, which would be basically shipping. And, yeah, I mean, it's I like it, seems pretty easy, you know, putting in the info and then printing out the cert as it comes out. I mean, so far, the experience that I've had with Steelhead, you know, the little bit that I've had. You know, communicating through email with the the reps. You know, if there's a little issue. We've been getting things fixed, I think so far. I like it, I love it. So, you know, I haven't had any any issues with it. So, what would I say? I think it's I think it's great, honestly. If we have the opportunity to do a first article, then the power quoting becomes very useful because we have an actual like moment to say, okay, it took us this many hours at this step, and this step, and this step, and this step, and these are the ones we're going to charge for so we put that in. It spits out a number. That's great. We use it for very specific situations. And then I do very much like. How easy it is to see what's been quoted. Having part numbers and drawings and stuff already in the system because the sales person quoted it, and then we can link that to the sales order when it gets physically here. Love that. That's great. That's a huge improvement. And then we do use it in the sales meeting to talk over what might be coming. I would say so, yes. Because there is a. There's an easy way to record history of part numbers. So you can see what did I quote this at before. Whereas in JobBoss you could do that but it took a lot of effort. The way it works there was extremely inefficient, so we didn't use it. In Steelhead We're still sort of adjusting how we're handling part numbers. We're getting more granular as we go so now we're putting in like the customer's actual drawing number as a reference, instead of just having. Sort of generic configuration descriptions. So having it more specific means there is a very explicit history of what it was quoted at. How long it took the last time we did it? Did we make money? What we need to quoted at next time? Any time something is outside of the normal, or they want to tell someone what they did, like I was supposed to use this belt, we didn't have it, so I used a, used version of this other belt for this long. And then this other thing for this. There's just. If we need to tell them, like, hey, the customer agreed that you can proceed X way. We just put it on there. They see it. They know what to do. The supervisors will go in and Like make sure people are paying attention to the right thing. We use comments quite a lot. Measurements if they're not something that we need to certify, but just like an in-process thing. A lot of them will put their measurements in the comments so that the next guy can see like, okay, so when they got it, it was like this. When I got it, it was like this. That means I need to do this. We have a lot of different outside service things that happen and it has made it infinitely easier to keep track of those things. Because like the different queues. So like the top left queue where it's like these are the parts that are going to go to outsourcing at some point in their life cycle. Huge. Sometimes I use that at all as a holding position for situations where like, I need to send the part back to a customer. They're not a vendor, they're a customer. So I can't issue them a PO, but we're not charging them either. They're just going to check something things themselves and then send it back to us. So like CMM inspection and internal CMM where Either It's a first article situation and they want to make sure we're not messing up their geometry, or we found something and we're like, hey, you need to look at this because this part is not in spec and you need to check it before we proceed. It'll just sit in that queue for a minute. No PO, nothing like that. But it keeps it out of the shop floor queues and makes it very easy to find like, okay, I need to ask this customer why they haven't sent that part back so it's easy to identify. And then the parts that are outsourced that have POs on them, it links them into the margins, which I love. I can track how long they've been out and it closes up so neatly. So, like once you're finished, it just. It's very organized. I like it a lot. JobBoss had a PO situation but there wasn't and there was an outsourcing like way you can set up steps. It was just harder to do and there wasn't a central location where you could look at all the things that were out, right, like you could go in to a work order and see, ah yes, it is on an outsourcing step, here's the PO, I found it. But there wasn't a way to say like, okay, what's at outsourcing? And it would show you a list of ten things or whatever, you couldn't. You couldn't do that, you'd have to sift through like 75 open POs and decide which ones were the right ones. So it was just much harder to keep track of, like at any given moment, what was out, what needed to go out. So the process tree was, that was where we spent 90% of our time in getting to the point where we were ready to implement. The meetings that I had with Jordan. We're almost entirely making sure the process trees were right. And the. We're we're. I don't know if I said this already. We're implementing at our JV right now. So we're doing the same thing there. And a couple of them have been like, well, why do we have to keep going through the trees? I'm like, listen. If you get the trees right. Everything else becomes easy. But you have to get the trees right. So it's been good. I received enough training such that if we need to make changes, I can go in and do it myself, which is great. And things are flexible, right? It's easy to make adjustments. It's easy to add new treatments. It's it's easy even to add new whole work boards. New entire processes. Like none of it is difficult enough that I have to not that Steelhead wouldn’t support if you guys, if I asked. But I can do it myself, right. And that's great. Like having the ability to go in and just make all that stuff and have it be useful. Is super. Like I made one. This is my favorite brilliant thing that I came up with. I made a customer hold process. That is. Solely for the purpose of putting reworks into when we're waiting for a customer to answer them. That way they're out of productions way and they're out of QCs way so they're off the QMS dashboard and they're out of productions work boards. They're just segregated over there. And then when you get an answer, you just complete the rework and either it goes to shipping for scrap or it goes to whatever step it needs to be at and it's clean and there's no like, time spent. There's no effort. It's just. It's like, we’re going to move it over here. And it doesn't stand in anyone's way. We have a lot of parts because we do repair work where it comes in and we're like, no, this is scrap. We cannot repair this. And so we'll put it into Steelhead and put it on a work order just so we can we can track it. It's very, very visible. And that way when we send out, like, backlogs, we can show our customers. Okay, you have these ten parts in process. You have these two parts, are waiting on customer hold. You have these five parts that are scrap, but you haven't, like, said, anything about them. So we're holding them until you give us permission to send them back. So it makes visibility for them very easy. But yeah the work board that had rejects on it. I just added a new card. Put customer hold there. It's great. We are religious about using it for powder. We've started using it for blast media. And we're also started using it for like some of the chemicals for, the chrome and the strip tanks. We deplete powder to the work orders because that one's easy to track. And also because the HVOF team is the most organized. So it was an easy proof of concept to have them start doing that. And then when we were ready to get other people to start doing it. We can have. Like here. Proof it works. Margins. It all goes back to margins. Because you can see how much, the powder cost and depending on what powder is used. Like if we have one color, one vendor whose powder is slightly more expensive and we can't get the other kind of powder anymore. Does this work suddenly become unprofitable? So like granularity in terms of how our margins are looking. In a lot of ways we've sort of stabilized. In terms of what new things we need and how much support we need. Everything's kind of just trucking along. Either Steelhead is already able to do what we want it to do, or we've figured out very, very easy ways that are low maintenance of using Steelhead to do something slightly outside of its own capability anyway. I am Ram. I am the Quality Manager at Precision Spray and Coatings and we are powered by Steelhead.
Taxonomy tags
Industry Industrial Coatings; Hard Chrome Plating; Thermal Spray; Manufacturing
Company size Mid-market / Enterprise
Use case Job costing; margin tracking; scheduling; workboards; quality management; NCR workflows; outsourcing tracking; reporting
Stage of journey Post-purchase / Advocacy