M2M Helps Fabrication Firm Enclose Costs
Case Study: Girtz Industries
Girtz Industries in Monticello, IN, builds sheet metal enclosures for companies all over the world. Although they tracked labor costs, the company had difficulty tracking important details about work in process. Girtz realized that they had to do something about their antiquated shop floor software. The company was growing, and they knew they had to get a better handle on shop floor production data. In 1999, they installed and started up business software from Made2Manage Systems, Indianapolis.
Now that they know what products actually cost, Girtz can price their enclosures more competitively. Girtz Industries has been growing steadily since 1996, when their sales were $3 million a year. They grew by nearly 50 percent in 1997, then doubled to $8.6 million in 1998, and increased to $12.3million in 1999.
Much of their work is for companies that make power generation equipment, such as diesel and natural gas powered engines that drive electrical generators. Girtz builds sheet metal enclosures to house the equipment in these power systems. The market for power generation equipment has soared in the past few years, and Girtz has grown with it.
Unfortunately, this rapid growth was playing havoc with their old software package. “For the past seven years, we had been using a business system that was based on DOS," says Tom Eden, plant manager. "We've known all along that the software had to be upgraded, at least to a Windows version, but we kept putting it off."
They saw the software's shortcomings five years ago. "Our sales manager made the comment that we didn't have any tool that showed us how many hours we had booked," says Eden. "We didn't have a button we could push that would show us where our bottlenecks were and where we were overloaded." Eden started looking at other problems and realized that the company couldn't track labor costs either or generate accurate parts lists or bills of materials. "Some of our enclosures have 130 to 150 different components," explains Eden. "Although they look similar and use many of the same parts, many enclosures are quite different. We simply didn't have time to track details and generate a bill of material up front."
Because Girtz would start a project without a complete bill of materials and couldn't track labor costs, it never really knew how much the products cost them to make. The old software had to go.
“With the Made2Manage business system, we are pricing our products accurately, shipping them on time, and building them with the highest quality."
Tom Eden, Girtz Industries, plant manager
