Kennewell CNC Machining Case Study

Operating a machine business sustainably can be challenging, as Kennewell CNC Machining of Murray Bridge, Australia discovered. Established more than 20 years ago, the business utilizes the latest techniques and technologies to ensure businesses around the world have the machined components they need to get the job done. That, however, was not always the case. As a small country machine shop, the business was heavily reliant on local clients, mainly operating within the agricultural sector. An inefficient business management system and ERP, however, resulted in the business running reactively. “We were always putting out fires,” explains founder and CEO Brett Kennewell. “That was our MO. Every day I came in, I dreaded the question: ‘What was going to be our emergency that day?'”

The personalized and close support during the onboarding process was very different from his experience with the last ERP system. “We loved the onboarding process! I’ll admit initially it was a bit overwhelming,” recalls Brett. “Even though everything flows so easily today, it was foreign to us at the time. But our trainer was there with us helping us learn and become proficient.” Support like this makes it possible for Kennewell to migrate more and more into ProShop all the time. For example, the company utilizes its training module for easy management of its training needs.

Some of the changes he asked of his machinists were difficult at first, Brett said. “We had never asked our employees to track time before and they didn’t understand why we wanted them to do that. But once we explained why, they all got on board and started doing it. That one change has allowed a host of other improvements. We can now much more easily track our schedule and improve our on-time delivery. Everyone knows what jobs are coming up on each machine and the machinists will often volunteer to run a job on their machine if they have capacity and they see a co-worker is at capacity. This new situation has led us to breaking revenue records and shipping jobs faster than ever before. Everyone is understanding the goals and working collaboratively together to achieve them! It’s fantastic! In fact, last week the whole company took Friday off because we shamed our sales goals. We’re winning all over the place!”

Job costing – which they were never able to do well in their old ERP, has become a critical part of their workflow. This analysis is crucial to keep jobs running profitably, as Brett discovered. “You realize that – because you’ve estimated on a piece of paper – you didn’t account for everything, like the time spent on job purchasing, quoting, set up and job kitting of tools. It’s how you cover the cost of your office staff, team leaders and things like that. We realized we were losing money on a lot of our jobs.” ProShop highlighted that the issue was not just a historic one, but a widespread one, too. With so many unprofitable jobs on the books, the discovery led to Brett asking his customers for a 20% increase on many jobs. It was not easy. Luckily, he had evidence from ProShop to back up his request and most costumers were fine with the increase. In addition to higher prices, ProShop gives them the ability to easily identify opportunities for improvement and drive those changes quickly. This has led to a significant boost to the bottom line of the business, allowing them to use that profit to add new equipment and grow. While making decisions with data is essential, it’s not Brett’s strongest suite. However, it is ProShop’s as Brett explains. “We have a workshop full of the highest qualified people in the industry. Onboarding engineers has been a real godsend because they are analytical and data driven. When they ask for this data, we can get it for them from ProShop. It’s making all the difference to every aspect of the business.”