Pearce Design Case Study

Pearce Design is a machine shop in Monroe Washington that has been using ProShop web based ERP for several years. Owner Joe Pearce is an efficiency guru and maximizes ProShop’s paperless workflow to rapidly process and efficiently manage many jobs at once. The photo below of Joe using 6 monitors, three of them with ProShop, says it all!

Joe says that ProShop allows him to manage a much larger number of jobs all at once than he used to be able to – at times up to 300 jobs at a time. In one notable example, Pearce Design received a very large purchase order with over 200-line items on it. Once the order was received the work had to begin. Besides being very fast with ProShop, Joe is also very thorough! As they hadn’t created unique estimates for all 200 parts at the time they quoted the work, they had the following steps to make:

1. Create 200 Estimates for all the parts by copying a few temples or existing estimates
2. Define the unique material sizes for each part number in the estimate. This consists of selecting the material type, size and cut tolerance for each piece
3. Define the tool lists for the CNC machines for each part number in the estimate. This consists of selecting cutting tools from ProShop’s Tool module for each machining operation.
4. Create a Quote with all 200 estimates on it, using ProShop’s Shopping Cart system. This was done extremely quickly using a query, selecting all 200 results and putting them in the Cart with a single click.
5. Copy all the Estimates records into Part records which will be used to generate Work Orders
6. Auto generate a client Purchase Order (Sales Order) in ProShop from the Quote with all 200 line items including prices, quantities and due dates.
7. Auto generate 200 Work Orders. (A 1 click process.)
8. Group all 200 Work Orders into a Shopping Cart and consolidate the demand for material and cutting tools by the approved vendors for each item
9. Issue purchase orders to the suppliers for all materials and cutting tools

Although this order had happened several months before the interview for this case study, Joe was able to look back at the time tracking for all of this work, and within about 1 minute, tell us the entire amount of time that was tracked against all the activities above. The total investment of time to process these jobs until the point that they were ready for CNC programming was only 3.6 minutes per part number. An extremely low number given how thorough and complete the workflow was. And best of all, if Pearce Design ever received orders for these parts again, the total time investment to process any new jobs would just be a few seconds per order.

Pearce Design is a great example of a company who has really embraced the digital workflow in ProShop and used it to maximize efficiency and throughput in the shop. They calculate that in the 4 years after fully implementing ProShop, they were able to increase their revenue by 36% with the same staff and equipment (Editor Note: This is a common percentage increase seen at other clients). One notable reason is that their jobs and setups are now much smoother and performed without interruption. Joe says it best himself:

“ProShop dramatically reduces interruptions in process flow. Prior to using ProShop, we would very frequently begin to set-up a job and find that we were missing a cutter or didn’t have enough material, the right size material, or any of the other countless issues that can occur while machining parts. It is now extremely rare that there are any interruptions in a Work Order as it moves through each process. With ProShop, you determine what goods and resources are needed and how the job will be processed. You only have to do it once and these details are quickly and easily documented within ProShop, and then you never have to wonder/remember/hunt around for a print with some notes on it again. ProShop has contributed considerably to our increase in sales throughput.”

The partnership the past 4 years between Pearce Design and ProShop has been a very positive one. To sum it all up, Joe says:

“ProShop enables my company to quickly, and precisely, organize and track every aspect of the manufacturing process. From quoting to planning to machining operations through to job profitability analysis, ProShop provides the value needed to constantly improve our operations. It would not be possible to process work at the pace we do without the functionality that ProShop provides. ProShop has also been extremely robust and stable. In the 4 years we have been using it, it has never been down a single day. The team at Adion has provided great support and is always very responsive. We would rate their level of service very highly.”