i am ceo of 3d industries my name is matt golick

matt rody 3d industries in bensonville illinois and i am the ceo

aerospace and medical high complexity five access work as well as anything that needs support

with edm

we have parts that range from on a good day plus or minus a tenth to a tenth and a

half and on a bad day down to 25 to 30 microns

all held in milling typically and again supported by wire surface finishes down to

12 ra that we hold right off the machines in addition to complex 3d geometry that

we have to complete in one setup for glove note glove glove using no

touch types of parts

a lot of our customers can’t afford contamination so we have to do

um sub sized clean room operation within the equipment so the

vacuum systems and all of that stuff comes into play when we’re working on parts like that

we used e2 manufacturing system for about 15 years before we found

proshop and at that time we had done a lot of overflow work for other shops

so i became a student of erp and as we started to have that conversation throughout the industry

with everybody there was no answer because all of the erp softwares were basically built on the same platform

and every one of them had scheduling problems and they weren’t necessarily designed for a precision ultra precision

multi-process machining right so if you were a

production shop like an injection mold shop that was making millions of parts job boss and e2 would be perfectly fine

but if again if you’re a job shop and your schedule is changing 10 times an hour well it’s just not

going to work so when i heard of proshop i was a little reluctant to get excited because i had

looked at every other erp software out there on the market and was disappointed

but then when paul came in and gave us a pitch we we started digging and the more we

dug we just found gold it was great

oh uh there were at least 15 other excel sheets and lists and

groups of data and you know and then on top of that everybody had their own individual lists that nobody else had

access to there was no transparency between those you know so we make sure that we drive

pro shop as our commonality it really has become the the single communication tool that we’ve

got in the building um we’re to the point and we have been for some time where the only people who even utilize their

email anymore the people who communicate with anybody outside the building all of our internal communications run directly

through pro shop because everything we talk about has got to be work order related so it belongs in the system somewhere so

that’s where it goes

in my career so far i’ve been through [Music] usage and in some cases implementations

of job boss plex e2 epicore and global shop

and the major significant improvement from the box that we get here with

proshop is there are rules built in and with all the other systems that i’ve dealt with you have to develop your own rules

just to be able to use the system right so out of the box pro shop is ready to go you just got to learn the rules that

are already there and you’re making parts you know so the setup time the implementation time is

significantly reduced because all the parts are already there you just put you don’t even have to put them together

it’s a machine you just learn how to turn it on and start cranking

yeah the all the other systems are built to be solutions for everybody and that by standard turns out almost

always not to be a solution for me because especially here at 3d we’re not everybody

you know we do unique projects and we take on challenges that other people are afraid of and requirements that are

above the norm and the other systems don’t have the tools or resources to be able to define

or follow the needs that we have without us setting up the system

customly to do it from scratch and really i want a system

that i can use not that i have to work on right i don’t buy a car just to tune the engine i buy it to drive it

it was more of a gut feeling at because of the overall setup of pro shop the fact that pro shop

was designed by people that had owned a job shop and knew what i was dealing with i could tell immediately

that what they were giving us was a the perfect ingredients and directions on

how to bake a cake and so all i had to do was just follow follow those directions use those ingredients and i’ll be

successful and that’s exactly what we did the significant feature that stood out

when we were researching proshop as well as what still stands out today is the direct tie-in for our quality

paperwork we run a quality centered business and proshop keeps quality at the heart of what it

does so that’s that’s been our probably number one

sales point for proshop for us and it maintains our number one best usage of pro shop to this day

the built-in fai documentation the built-in and process check documentation our ability to be

flexible with assigning what goes where and how it’s applied

multiple dimensions as we step through the process back and forth and specifically the ability to

add reference information in for instructions to part check

right so we had a gentleman start with us who couldn’t even spell caliper at the time

within a day we were teaching him how to use sun and boar gauges and we knew that he could continue using

him because as we were doing his training we filmed and attached the film directly to the

dimensions that he had to check for that part so whenever he needed a refresher the capacity in pro shop to attach that

video right where he needs to use it gave him the opportunity to always pull

it up it was always right at his fingertips so there was never a concern or an issue that he was going to screw it up because

he always had the reference right there

uh it was it was actually very smooth compared to the other softwares that i’ve implemented

and it goes back to the fact that there are rules already for the system to function within um it wasn’t me

deciding how it should function and then making the system do that thing and then teaching everybody else how to

do it right it was me understanding the rules and then me teaching other people the rules

and that was it so it cut at least forty percent out of the garbage i had to deal with when

implementing something of this

complexity so we were running our first couple of jobs in a month

we were basically functional where work orders were out on the floor and they were getting checked off as

they were supposed to and followed through in other systems the most recent implementation i’d done

before pro shop it was about nine months

for uh it was plex so it was a massive system the company was

only about 80 people and at the time of pro shop implementation we were about 35 people

so there’s really no sensible reason it should take nine months to implement a system like

that it was just the absolute enormity and complexity of it that was totally unnecessary

and it’s all due to the fact that we had to figure it out for ourselves you know so our experience with proshop

was significantly positive especially in comparison to the other choices

i it’s it’s that same thing i still talk about the visual communication with people and the buying raw material

i mean the simplicity of it is still a massive massive benefit right

my my programmer can literally just define the size of the material that he needs and the number of pieces and the

purchasing folks can buy it without any second guessing they get their quotes

they send out pos they set dates right and they can do all of that without having to

take a pause from their day to interface with each other they interface through the system and it

makes it so much simpler and more effective and we get stuff our turnaround times probably half

or less of what it was for that kind of information because of pro shop

pro shop in our has streamlined our office for uh many different ways i think um

just having a proven process to follow we did not have that before so everything was haphazard um

i always laugh and joke that before pro shop i ran a pirate ship and i was a captain and it was just nuts

and so when we implemented pro shop just everybody had buckets to put things in they had they had order they had

direction and so we followed everything to an absolute t

uh and that was that was key so you you cannot half ass pro shop either you have to be

all in or don’t even bother from my opinion proshop has streamlined our in-office processes our

quoting our estimating as well as our purchasing and all of our interface with external sources whether

they be customers or vendors

the shop communication with the office has been significantly improved um the design and the automation in the

communication is what’s great the color coding the visual statuses and my guy’s ability to on the floor to

define technical details and then translate them directly to somebody in the office so that somebody doesn’t necessarily have to

fully understand them in order to function create pos communicate with the outside world and so on

they’re allowed to do all that stuff without having to be in-depth knowledgeable about why the

material size is what it is or any of the other things because the guys who have the technical responsibility

define that for them right so it’s it’s done a great job putting the responsibility in the

appropriate place and we function so much smoother just due to those things those simple

things yeah being paperless was a little

cumbersome at the start but after a while um after everybody started getting used to the process yeah

it probably at least cut our time in half out there right and we get better data right they

have to sign in they have to put the data in so and we have a way to track it so it’s

fantastic we have seen a large reduction in our lead time from po receipt

to getting the information onto the shop floor i would attribute that to our ability to

cost estimate to a greater detail within proshop and then directly translate all of that

information right to the part level so that i don’t need to redundantly enter or or reconsider

a lot of the details that we’ve already considered we’re allowed to translate all the work we’ve already done from the estimating

side to the manufacturing side seamlessly

the difficulties that we’ve been able to overcome with the digital system like proshop are keeping track of information all of

the information whether it’s current status of a job we were making 100 pieces but we

scrapped out three and we need to get more material all those things now are communicated and happen instantly

versus somebody going home at the end of the day and forgetting to mention it or you know we don’t end up short on

work we don’t end up missing things there are very rare instances where anything is is mistaken because we have

the ability to identify everything every requirement every aspect

that we need for everything that we do whether it be the actual production of the work whether it just

be in the details of the print we’ve overcome all of those

difficulties because we have somewhere to define all the requirements clearly and concisely for everybody

yes we use proshop as it’s designed and that has been again it’s it’s one of those aspects

where you have to slow down the speed up and initially using all the little bells

and whistles of pro shop especially with you know we take a lot of videos of our setups and at first it seems like you’re

wasting time however people come and go and we just recently had one of our late operators

get a union job and a great guy and we had a party for him sent him on his way

however we had to hire a new person and they went in and he was up and running in a

week on that job because he he walked through all of the videos all the pictures all

of our descriptions and it was just so that 15 minutes or 20 minutes that they spent

making that video probably saved us a week in production trying to start from scratch the visual work instructions

have been a huge benefit when we try to repeat the complexities

that we’ve had to figure out once without the visual reconstructions that we’ve got it’s

reinventing the wheel right you don’t make money the second time around or the third time around when you’re consistently reinventing

so the the visual work instructions that we maintain in pro shop have allowed us to become profitable on complex work much

more much more rapidly so we’re we’re up and running quicker the second

time around than we ever thought we would be in the past before we had that option

yeah our setup time has probably been cut in half i would say with proshop um just strictly because of the the way

at which we approach every job um our fanatical attention to detail as one of our

company’s core values so we start with the setup process during our kickoff meeting that we have

before the order goes out to the shop so that’s where we start our process

if i had to guess our overall improvement in efficiency was probably 25 across the board

i absolutely love the methodology of our outside processing prints at this point because i can

define even the most complex prints i can give to a vendor and it’ll only take me minutes to pop it

through we utilize high qa to do our ballooning and the the integration that we have

between iqa and proshop to set our approved prints up and then to turn that approved print into

something that my outside vendor can use and need only takes me minutes so we have

significantly increased our throughput on the office side of all of that kind of information

in regards to quality pro shop i think our our whole team would say that that’s the number one

benefit that we’ve gotten from from proshop for sure across the board our customers would say the same

the way that we organize our data right the way that our we have our in-process checks

um i mean we’ve had companies like spacex come in here and literally tell us that this is the best setup they’ve

ever seen and when we open up pro shop their eyes get wild and they ask us if they can

tell their other shops about pro shop because they want their data moving

through the shop the exact same way that we move it through our shop we won’t be able to compare but pro shop has finally

provided us the ability to gather that data accurately ncrs and scrap and

especially the cost associated with those things we’ve really been able to get a good handle on what those are since we started using proshop

we’ve used the ncr cause codes and the quality side of things actually to eliminate equipment in the

building because we come to find that jobs legacy work that’s been running for years isn’t anywhere near as profitable

as people think it is because of things like scrap and the rates that

we get paid for the jobs you know so it’s really helped us identify weak links in what we do

our ability to transfer that information from our customer floatons to our vendors especially when we do

selective plating you know we have we have parts that go through seven

finishing processes everything from magnetic particle and penetrant inspection with etching

to eddy current as far as ndts go to a variety of chem films and anodize and

teflon and paint and part marking you know you name it and we’ve got parts that have all of it

at one time

yeah in the last in 2019 we have had six audits um

every one of them has been a grand slam home run um one of the toughest customers that we do

work for uh is called is harris harris precision and harris said that our system was sexy

which we thought was one of the best compliments you can get from a company like harris precision in

they’re tough to please

so as far as organizing all of our our data pro shop is streamlined that to almost

perfection right so we you know everybody in the building is is

gets it quote unquote and is absolutely dedicated to put everything in the right place before pro shop we had you know we were

just using file folders and it was a mess and no one was doing it the same way so you could find the

data but it would be cumbersome you wouldn’t be able to just click on it it wasn’t on a screen

nobody it was again it wasn’t a proven process and again i keep going back you know what proshup gave us was just a

blueprint for a proven process all we had to do was just follow the directions it was simple proshop’s ability to

gather the information that we attach throughout the process is phenomenal

we build our fai paperwork in minutes versus hours we don’t have more any more

filing cabinets there’s no looking for anything we put it in the right place

as it happens and it causes our quality team to be able to do

their job in a fraction of the time that they used to so the our ability to associate the

proper information to the proper portions of the process because of pro shop has been phenomenally beneficial

the difference is pro shop knows how to use it once you’ve attached it so in any other system you can you can

throw in pictures or videos or whatever you like but within proshop

those things that you attach become part of the automated functionality that makes your job easier down

the road proshop builds the entire back end

of our folder structure so we have somewhere to put everything that relates to that part you attach a document in pro shop has

its own home uh specifically for things that have been attached in that place whether it be on your vendor po or

whether it be on your work order level or whether it be just on the

top level of a part

so the the access is is pretty awesome because it’s always there

and we always know where to find it later on because it doesn’t go anywhere

our final inspection process has sped up tremendously our quality manager we built pro shop

around quality because pro shop was obviously built around quality so our quality manager

um has really taken it to the next level and so again at first it’s a little

cumbersome getting everything in the right place but then as you start getting your stride

our our final inspection has been has never gone faster it is it is

streamlined and it’s tight and everybody’s bought into the process because it’s all about final inspections getting those parts

out the door that’s key

yeah the the paperless method is significantly faster than the paper

method uh our guys can operate in parallel as opposed to in series and

within aerospace we frequently get rev changes and the simplicity by which we can

update all the documentation that we have in-house and put the appropriate things on hold and let the appropriate things

continue and so on without having to run around the shop floor and collect all of the travelers

or routers or prints or any you know kind of control documents because they’re all maintained within the system

has been amazing our machinists adapted the pro shop um

it was it was different there was really no uh rule of thumb you know they were that

we had you know old crusty tool makers that snapped right in they loved it

and we had old crusty tool makers that fought it and out the door they went same with the young millennial crowd

right some of the young millennials loved it and some didn’t and the ones that didn’t we snapped them right out of the building

and what we were left with was a crew that truly gets it because then everybody’s dedicated absolutely

when you’re implementing this at other shops and they’ll give you the same is is is the key is to get the owner to

get on board right i was on board the minute i saw it because i was like it was like a key that went in my brain and just clicked

you know and when i saw it i was like oh finally there’s something i i can use and then

we and then the struggle was to to get everybody to to to buy into it right to understand

what it was to see it at 10 000 feet and it took a little bit of time but again once everybody

gathered around and embraced it it’s like now everybody’s policing each other like what do you mean you didn’t make a video

right like it’s at first it was like i gotta make a video but now it’s like so everybody’s kind of policing everybody

else and it’s just like now the law you know in our shop

the machinists were originally very afraid of getting rid of paper they

still to some degree like to have something to hold on to once we

went full board and put the computers in next to their equipment so they had

access to the information everywhere they needed to that fear subsided um

they’ve been a big they’ve been big fans of having all of that information right at their disposal within a click they can go from the

print to all their in process dimensions to their tooling lists on the machines and

any other thing that they need to grab is just available at all times right there it’s not

stained in oil it’s not covered in scribbles and markups and math

it’s all clean and constantly available so they’ve been enormous fans now that they have access

immediately and in the right place

our machinists definitely have and feel as they do and take more ownership in

what they’re doing it puts them in the control of the details that they should be in control

of in the positions that they’re in it gives them the opportunities to see

out further to plan better and to react more quickly with better support from those of us

around them right they’re the value-added people in our shop and they need to get the job done so when they need the support pro

proshop has helped us give them that support much more quickly and much more effectively

our on-time delivery has gotten to the point where it’s exceeded our expectations strictly

because of pro shop before we weren’t really able to track that data effectively we were again just a pirate

ship type job shop and everything was just fire fighting and disorganized and we

weren’t really able to like sit down and actually track that data but now with proshop uh it’s just a

click of a button and everybody in the building can see and track how their jobs are going out so it’s it’s

it’s created almost like a cult where everybody is now bought in the pro shop

they understand how the system works and why it works so they’re not just like a segregated

bubble most most employees think that that erps are so uh

are are designed to uh babysit people or to to to track their performance where

we’ve put the way that pro shop is designed it doesn’t take long for people to understand like oh if i if i do this right it’s to help me

and it’s and if it helps me it’s going to help everybody we have we have gotten a lot of positive feedback from our

customers based on our improvements and things like on-time delivery as well as quality delivery part of our

management review sessions every month are to track our on-time delivery our

ncrs and those kind of statistics with the focus on that that we’ve been

allowed to make and have because of proshop’s tracking abilities we’ve driven our on-time deliveries up

over 92 percent consistently and our customers are thrilled for it we’ve actually gotten more work

from more of our customers because we’ve been able to improve our quality and delivery simultaneously

another metric that improved for me i’m also the sales manager was customer satisfaction and trust

and we do a lot of real complex multi-process aerospace parts and so our customers that come in here

obviously having vendors that are falling down you know not hitting their lead times

quality problems and when they come in and we show them our proven process which we actually call proshot

um immediately they are sued and relieved and they say oh our

our parts are are safe here and then as we start to give them data and feedback

right from pro shop they can call us up and where’s my part at and we can tell

them exactly where it’s at we can tell them how we’re doing after the job is completed

when they come back in we’ll have them we’ll pull up a dashboard and we’ll have them walk through our

process and they can see the attention to detail which we’ve processed their job and at that point

it’s it’s a home run and now they now the problem is that you have to stop them from shoving work in your shop and

growing too quickly that’s a problem that we have that’s a good one

one feature that i cannot live without now that i have pro shop is is reporting is the accurate reporting

with e2 i was never able as an owner i was never able to get good hard data it was always opinions

but now that we’re actually using the erp the way it’s designed i actually can have facts i could bring everybody in a room and we could

talk about facts and get ego and opinion completely out of it i don’t know how i would run a job shop

now without without accurate data for proshot

it’s proshop has really helped us gauge what is the appropriate and most profitable work for our business

we’ve actually eliminated jobs that have run for years that people thought were profitable because we’ve identified that they are

not based on the data we can gather with proshop

uh yeah the price since we’ve started with proshop the profitability of the company has actually gone up

35 um and that is including a reduction in workforce of 50

so we’ve actually shrunk our resources and our efficiencies have gone up so significantly that with

half the people we are making over 35 percent more revenue than we were previously

so personally for me one of the benefits of proshop was peace of mind

running a job shop is they say it’s one of the hardest jobs in the world and i’ll say it is the

hardest job in the world it’s the farthest away you can get from the mcdonald’s business model let’s say

and every business book that i ever read was around the mcdonald’s business model

so when we implemented pro shop we tried to get as close as we could to the mcdonald’s business model

pro shop helped us with that it streamlined all of our processes it’s still a job shop but it’s a lot

easier as an owner to be able to run a business model that

works versus fighting a business model that doesn’t

i would say that my business is more valuable to me now than it ever was um and obviously if

i wanted to sell it now that i have a proven process um i can i’ll

demand a higher price but it’s not for sale and and and for me it’s just it’s so

valuable because it’s what i’ve always wanted since i started a job shop was to have a place that my employees can come in

and be organized and and love what they do it’s just it’s it’s not the grind of

of uh insanity chaos and turmoil pro shop is you know we we call it logos it’s it’s

bringing you know logic and wisdom to chaos and turmoil without a system like pro shop i don’t

know how i don’t know how we would still survive

i love pro shop i absolutely love pro shop yeah it’s it is it has been

a blessing i don’t think i would still be in business without pro shop to tell you the truth i would have sold my business if i

wouldn’t have found an erp that worked period end of story yeah and everybody knew that i

was i was tired i was getting ready to give up um and it just i could not find a

software that would work that would work for me i i tried everything i talked to every shop every owner

every erp and it was just a dead end and then when i when i found pro shop

like i said it was just like a key that fit and we grabbed onto it and ran it was great

yeah the only reluctancy that i have in doing this interview right now is because pro shop is our

secret weapon and uh my fear is that every pro shop every shop is going to turn into a pro

shop user and i’m just going to melt into the into the norm but uh right now it is it

is our secret weapon and we’re uh yeah we’re really proud of it right now we i use it as a sales tool

uh when i’m out pitching to different prospects

yeah i have i also own a edm graphite distribution company

so i have access to all sorts of different jobs across the country and every shop owner or foreman that i

run into in that business erp is always a topic of conversation and i always recommend

proshop to every one of them i’m excited about the about

manufacturing in general and i believe that manufacturing is going to be coming back into the united

states at a rapid rate and i think that lead times are going to continue to be driven down

i think there’s going to be more strategic partnerships

between companies and pro shop lends it to that lends itself to a strategic partner with

a company because there there’s more trust there’s not just what’s your you know they send a quote out to 10

people and whoever makes the biggest mistake gets the job right that’s not the type of relationships that we’re going to be

building in the future the relationship that we’re going to be building are our actual

strategic partnerships like was done in the 60s when when manufacturing was built when this infrastructure was built

or our country was built it was all around trust and

and and systems and strategic

partnerships