Alex and Payton wrapped up Work Order training and had an epiphany when they really understood the full ramification of how “Build-To-Inventory” Work Orders and be used to schedule economic batch sizes across their machines, and then they can ship “Pull-From-Inventory” jobs to fulfill Customer Purchase Order demand. It’ll vastly simplify how they schedule their shop, and improve margins with fewer changeovers and bigger batch sizes. They also trained this week on ProShop’s scheduling module. They learned the difference between forward scheduling, backward scheduling, fixed date, and how each work center can be customized for their own unique use cases. Alex can see how this will make it easier for him and his leads, as employees can easily see exactly what jobs are coming up next, so they don’t need to ask management what to work on next. Seeing the excitement in their faces makes our day!
Payton and Alex have gotten exposed to some ProShop features that spawned a bit of a philosophical discussion with Paul about how to run a precision machining company efficiently. The Pre-Processing Checklist was a hot topic today and they can see how it can see how it increase throughput by focusing on the tasks they perform every day, but doing it a bit sooner in their process, and a bit more systematically. After all, the goal of ProShop is to build a scalable system so they can get out of the weeds and focus on growing their business - or whatever else they want to focus on, like taking more vacation!!
Alex and Payton have wrapped up estimating and have learned how those estimates and quotes flow into the Customer PO, Parts, and Work Order modules. It’s exciting to see the real-world application of part numbers they are making right now, and odd scenarios they need to deal with from their customers. Alex will have to change his estimating process a little bit, but he sees the vision and knows why it’s critical to their growth. The functionality of multiple routings in the Part and WO modules are blowing their minds. This was an exciting episode and you can see on their faces how ProShop is going to be so instrumental in their company’s success.
Alex Berger bought Micro Space Products about 3 years ago. He and his wife Payton and have grown the aerospace machine shop significantly over that time, which revealed significant weaknesses in the the old ERP system, E2, they inherited with the business. Being overwhelmed by the work involved in just a simple date change to an order, and also no great way to import in the thousands of line items of new contracts they were receiving, with little support from ECI, they went looking for a new ERP system. When they found ProShop ERP, they knew immediately it was the system to build the foundation of the company on. In this first episode, they’re about 4 weeks into training and are loving the process already. They got paired up with their Implementation Specialist - Justin who has deep personal experience helping run an advanced CNC machine shop with ProShop, so he’s been a fantastic resource for them. Check out this episode and check back weekly for new updates as we follow their progress.
Sean and James describe the past few months implementing ProShop and learning from our team on how to run a shop more effectively with ProShop. They share that ProShop has brought a huge amount of accountability to their company, and recommends that any shop managing sophisticated work should consider an ERP like ProShop. it’s been a very fun opportunity to get to know the Cerven brothers and we have huge respect for what they’re building at Cerven Solutions and are grateful to be a small part of their success.
We check in with Sean and James to see how their last few weeks of implementation are shaping up. They proudly show off their process for looking up Work Orders, and how this will continue to be a beneficial method in the future with the help of ProShop.
Paul and the guys discuss how material purchases work in ProShop, and how they have the ultimate control of how costs are allocated to jobs, related jobs with shared materials, and more.
In this episode the guys share how they’re starting to build inspection plans, and learned how to link specific inspection gages to the plan.They also dig deep and Paul shares some ideas on how to speed up part creation by customizing drop-down menus, overwriting operations, or creating templates.
Sean and James talk about labeling workstations to make it easy for employees to know what and where to work, alternate ways to buy material that doesn’t require an inventory item, and then Paul digs deep into the settings and theory of different methods of estimating work to price it more accurately for the market.
In this episode Paul, James and Sean talk about 3 main topics, from material remnants, to accounting integration, and lastly inspection plans and quality reporting. The Cerven team is really seeing how ProShop will streamline so many of their currently manual processes.
Sean and James are starting to have their new employee use ProShop to help with equipment maintenance. They also talk about their estimating templates and how they realize how much it’ll make their lives so much easier.
Paul and the guys discuss ways they’ve found to better track inventory for finished goods, and for their hardware (and why they won’t need to throw away extras), how they’re starting to estimate some jobs, and understand estimating better. Paul gives them some ideas to think about for estimating time budgets for their Xometry work and a few other things.
In week 3, Sean and James share their interest in getting ISO 9001 and AS9100 certified, after they had met last week with Kelly from the QMS team to learn about the QMS modules.
Sean and James are already jumping into the equipment module to solve some immediate shop needs they have to track their thread gauge inventory. They discuss some best practices with Paul around this topic and other new things they’re learning this week in the shop.Activity
In this first episode, we get to know the brothers at Cerven Solutions, Sean and James, how they chose an ERP when they were just 2 employees, and what the onboarding process has been so far in the first few of weeks. We talk about their trainer, Kevin, who’s a machinist by trade and also used to use ProShop at a machine shop he worked at, so he’s a perfect trainer for them.We also get into the topic of the Small Machining Business Facebook group that James started just a couple of years ago, which now has 13k members!
Chad and his team are starting to see impactful improvements and changes as they really get running on ProShop. Chad has seen a 13% improvement in on-time delivery in the past couple of months. They have also seen a reduction in front-end lead times from approximately 2 weeks to less than 24 hours in some cases. Chad also shares that a lead from the stamping department has shared that she loves seeing the targets and tracking time, which has led to reduced setup reduction times. These are the types of improvements that ProShop promises to deliver, so it’s great to see those results happening.
Chad shares what he would have told himself if he could go back and advise himself at the beginning of an ERP implementation. Then Chad and Paul get into the topic of employee onboarding and training and share a template of how to manage that process in ProShop.
Heather and Paul discuss how ProShop has made it much easier to maintain material traceability, streamline accounting, improve their inventory, and a lot more.
Listen to the third episode in the series as Paul and Chad discuss next steps for Hibshman Screw Machine.
Listen to the second episode in the series as Paul and Chad discuss work orders, the process of organizing their org chart and more.
Listen to the first episode in the series as we dive deep into what the Implementation process is like with one of our customers, Hibshman Screw Machine!
Listen to the final episode in this series with RX Industries, as Tom & Paul wrap up RX Industries’ journey of Implementing ProShop!
Listen to the tenth episode in this series with RX Industries. Tom and Paul take a tour of RX Industries and discuss how ProShop has been successfully launches in the shop!
Listen to the ninth episode in this series with RX Industries. Listen to Tom and Paul discuss how RX industry is using the tools in ProShop!
Listen to the eighth episode in this series with RX Industries. Listen to Tom and Paul discuss RX Industries first job shipped!
Listen to the seventh episode in this series with RX Industries. Listen to Tom and Pauldiscuss RX Industries progress with checklists, profits, and work orders!
Listen to the sixth episode in this series with RX Machine. Tom and Paul discuss work orders, purchase orders, and ordering material!
Listen to the fifth episode in this series with RX Machine. Catch up with Tom and Paul as they discuss estimating and go through a tour of the RX Industries shop!
Listen to the fourth episode in this series with RX Industries. Listen to Tom and Paul discuss RX Industries progress with the TIP WO and go over what Tom has learned about ProShop’s estimating module.
Listen to the third episode in this series with RX Industries. Paul and Tom discuss users and further discuss the org chart.
Listen to the second episode in this series with RX Industries. Catch up with Tom and learn why the first training session is about the Org Chart module in ProShop. It’s not what you’d typically expect for an ERP system.
Listen to the first episode in this series with RX Industries. Meet Tom and learn how RX industries went about doing research on ERP, how they chose ProShop, and what the onboarding process has been so far.
Listen to the tenth episode in the series as Paul and Andy discuss gaining ground and awareness on the shop floor.
Listen to the ninth episode in the series as Paul and Andy discus what has been happening over at Ripley Machine as Ripley gets ProShop more and more integrated onto the shop floor.
Listen to the eight episode in the series as Paul and Andy talk about getting all of Ripley’s parts into ProShop, work order routings, and purchase orders!
Listen to the seventh episode in the series as Paul and Andy discuss Ripley’s audit, documents, and the equipment module in ProShop!
Listen to the sixth episode in the series as Paul and Andy discuss data entry and making sure that Ripley is ready for their upcoming Audit!
Listen to the fifth episode in the series as Paul and Andy discuss both equipment and preventative maintenance.
Listen to the fourth episode in the series as Paul and Andy discuss both equipment and work orders.
Listen to the third episode in the series as Paul and Andy discuss work orders, purchasing from the work orders, material and tooling.
Listen to the second episode in the series as Paul and Andy discuss what happened after Ripley decided on ProShop, including the on-boarding process and the beginning of Implementation.
Listen to the first episode in the series as we dive deep into what the Implementation process is like with one of our customers, Ripley Machine!
Listen to the second episode in the series as Paul and talk about documentation, work orders and the overall flow of the ProShop implementation.
TNT Aerospace is located in Sumas, Washington and is proud to be powered by ProShop. They specialize in engineering services, process automation, tooling & fixtures, tool & die making, mold making and CNC/EDM machining. Listen to the first episode in this series and get insightful knowledge on how they utilize ProShop in their daily work.
Colbrit Manufacturing is located in South Carolina, and is proud to be powered by ProShop. They specialize in engineering services, process automation, tooling & fixtures, tool & die making, mold making and CNC/EDM machining. Listen to this episode and hear how they got started with ProShop and how it's advanced their shop.
Hear how Heather has gotten creative with training the other employees at FreeForce this week, and how she's excited to make it easy to onboard new employees in the future.
Hear about Free Force's experience of implementing ProShop in this podcast! In this first episode, you will hear about why they switched ERP systems and how things are going with ProShop.