Able Manufacturing, LLC
Case Study: Able Manufacturing LLC
Company: Able Manufacturing LLC
Industry: Fabrication / Assembly
Location:U.S.A.
About The Company
Able Manufacturing, LLC located in Joplin, MO. is a custom manufacturer, specializing in metal, plastic and composite fabrication, finished paint and assembly operations primarily for large OEMs in the transportation, construction, agricultural, mass transit, wind energy and marine equipment industries.
Key Challenge
• Required ERP to handle highly complex, short run manufacturing environment
• Needed to replace 15 year-old, highly customized, non-updated ERP system
• Batch and manual processes limited data integrity
• Lack of EDI integration
• Lack of integrated MRP capabilities
• Lack of real-time visibility into inventory
Solution
• iVP - Solarsoft’s integrated enterprise business system
for manufacturing and distribution
Key Benefits
• Inventory accuracy increased from 85% to 98%
• Reduced annual physical inventories from 4 to 1
• Dramatic reduction in inventory to virtually JIT levels
• Integrated EDI, shipping, time and attendance, MRP and bar-coding yield real-time data
The Situation
Able Manufacturing's business is the embodiment of complexity. The company supplies heavy equipment OEMs in a wide range of industries with virtually one-of-a-kind large assemblies and engineered systems. In one segment of its business - fabricating and assembling truck cabs - BOMs consisting of 1,000 to 4,000 component parts are typical. Some of those parts are metal, some plastic, some composite, and are fabricated onsite. Components are purchased from suppliers, numbering in the hundreds, requiring 4-6 weeks for delivery, some longer.
"We're not a company selling garden hoses, where the biggest decision is what color to run. We're extremely complex and diversified," says Jim Schwarz, Able's President and CEO. "Our core competency is combining capabilities in metal, plastic and composite fabrication with finish-paint and assembly processes to deliver a custom product. We do some limited, short-run repetitive manufacturing, getting an occasional order for 4 or 5 of the same assembly, but generally we operate in a job shop environment."
Comprehensive functionality for a highly complex environment
The 50+ year-old company has evolved from a manufacturer of bolt-on truck sleepers into a business supplying product for specialty truck, marine, military, mass transit, wind energy and even nuclear and coal-powered energy production applications. A few years into that evolution, decision-makers at Able Manufacturing realized the company's legacy ERP application, with its high degree of customization and bolt-on functionality, could not support the range of essential capabilities needed without extensive upgrades.
"Everything was a hodgepodge. The system was about 15 years old and hadn't been upgraded in seven years, probably because that would have required massive changes to all the custom code," says IT Manager Deonna Robertson. "It would have taken two upgrades to get us to the current version and the provider was discontinuing support of the version we were on." Add to that an annual maintenance cost approaching $50,000 and the company opted to evaluate other ERP options.
The Solution
The evaluation criteria focused on full functional integration, from EDI and MRP to financials, while also emphasizing bar-code scanning and inventory tracking capabilities - all of which lead to the selection of Solarsoft iVP. "We simply could not function as the business we are today without Solarsoft iVP. It is integral to our operations," says Schwarz, who points out that
Solarsoft iVP's implementation coincided closely with the ramp-up of the company's specialty truck-cab business. "We were in that segment in a small way prior to Solarsoft, building one or two cabs a day and it was horrendous. With Solarsoft, we reached a point where we were managing 30 cabs in a day."
According to Ms. Robertson, who joined Able Manufacturing in time to lead the search for a new ERP solution, the degree of manual intervention required by the company's previous system had rendered its data virtually useless and made the task of tracking thousands of part numbers impossible. "I don't know how in the world they scheduled production, I really don't. There was nothing close to real-time visibility into inventory, and maintaining availability and lead-time data on each part was so time-intensive that nobody was doing it," she says. "There was no EDI integration, so when I first got here I spent all my time putting out fires. I once spent a week tracking down and correcting the code on an ASN that didn't go out." EDI integration, she explains, is required for ISO certification, a vital prerequisite to being a supplier to many of Able Manufacturing's customers.
Leveraging Solarsoft integration
The company leverages Solarsoft iVP's integration and real-time data visibility to its fullest. "Now we order components and schedule production directly from each BOM as we receive it from our customer, whether via EDI or through our engineering department," says Schwarz. "We run MRP every night, report production and track lead times and costs. With the volume of product coming in and out of our facility we couldn't do it without Solarsoft."
Knowing what to order and when to order it allows Able Manufacturing to maximize inventory turns and achieve nearly JIT inventory levels, another marked departure from the past. "Much of what we make is so customized that we might only use a part twice a year, but we used to have to purchase and store that part in inventory as insurance against not having it on-hand when we needed it," says Robertson. "We used to dedicate half of one of our buildings as a parts warehouse and do four physical inventories a year. We now have one row of shelves and it's not even full. Our inventory accuracy is tight enough with Solarsoft that we deliver the parts we need directly to the production line."
Indeed, Robertson says her company has decreased its physical inventories to one annually and inventory accuracy is at 98%, up from an estimated 85% with the previous ERP system. She also points to a marked decrease in instances where overnight parts shipments were required due to unforeseen outages as another example of the benefits of Solarsoft's enhanced inventory tracking and planning capabilities.
"We clearly needed to move on from where we were; we needed to evolve," Schwarz summarizes. "Becoming the highly diversified business we are now required modernizing and extending our ERP capabilities. Solarsoft fit the bill perfectly."
