Hi, I'm Mark from Superior Fishing Products. We started in 2020, and we are located in Upper Michigan. Superior Fishing Products started as a hobby. I started doing this as a kind of evenings and weekends gig. We're four years in now. By about year two, it started spiraling a little bit, I guess, for lack of a better word, out of control. I started going at it full time. All the concepts were in my head at that point. Let's just say my head was about to explode. Obviously, we're focused on growth. The goal is to bring it up a very good percentage from where we're at now. Obviously, increase the personnel. We're going to need a new facility here in the future.
The goals for Superior Fishing Products — primarily, our focus is the big water industry. We want to be able to come in as one-stop shopping. We want to have every product they need to set up their boat for open water, whether it be Lake Superior, fish waters of a lake here on Lake Nichi, or any of the Great Lakes. The goal is to take our product now and keep adding new products to the point where we can basically be the only manufacturer they need.
Hi, I'm Luke Aul. I'm the co-owner of Superior Fishing Products, and my role here is I kind of run the day-to-day operations as far as what needs to get manufactured on the front-end side of things. I put the sales orders in Steelhead and kind of get things laid out so they can take it on the shop floor and run with it from there. When I came on, a lot of it was moved out of Mark's head onto spreadsheets. I mean, as you guys know, with spreadsheets, you end up with a lot of them, and we kind of needed a place to consolidate all of them, and that's where Steelhead came into play.
I had found out about Steelhead and had used a previous ERP system. There were things about it that I wasn't happy with. There was a lot of clicking that I felt was unnecessary. It should have been able to take you from one page to the next rather than needing to go back to go forward, which Steelhead does a pretty good job of, being able to click through things in a sequential manner. So far, from what I've used, I much prefer it over the other systems I've used.
The work boards helped the guys out in the shop. So, like the machinists out there, they can go onto the machining workboard and see what's coming up, what is in the queue for them to work on. Purchase orders have been nice because you're able to track everything that you have out for order. Then, obviously, when it comes in, you're receiving it, and you know it's on the shop floor. And then, I guess, to go along with the purchase orders — outsourcing, we know what's at coating. We're able to easily pull it up and look at it, whereas before, we would have to call over to coating, and we would try to keep track, but on spreadsheets, it was really tough to. Steelhead brings it all into one place, so it's way easier to keep track of what's where and what needs to happen.
The powder coating vendor that we use also uses Steelhead, so I've seen some of the layout, the workflow, and how it works, and we would be able to implement it into our shop. The deployment process went smoothly. I mean, obviously, it's a lot of work building up all your transformation trees. I would say, all in all, it went pretty smoothly. The guys on the floor are grabbing onto it, and they’re using it. They have questions here and there, just like any other software, but it seems like it's going pretty good.
The main problems we had before Steelhead were that everything was kind of scattered. We spent a lot of time searching for various spreadsheets, keeping track of inventory. Good inventory was a little bit of an issue just because you always had to update the spreadsheets, and at times, you'd have to update multiple spreadsheets. So, Steelhead consolidates it all to one place. Timesheets, clock in, clock out — we use it for that, and job costing. The support from Steelhead has been much better than the previous ERPs I've worked with. When I call with a question, I get an answer normally within minutes.