Diversified Manufacturing Technologies (DMT) is a modern and technology driven machine shop in the Pacific Northwest. Owners TJ Quale and Seth Tromburg bought the shop from the previous owner in 2010. The previous owner had been running a dirty and disorganized shop that was barely breaking even and was using an old paper based legacy ERP system to run the shop. Things weren’t organized and were not going in a positive direction. Orders were often late, had cost overruns and quality problems and employees were quitting in droves. Seeing an opportunity, both Seth and TJ who worked as machinist/programmers for the shop, starting talking about buying the shop. They came to an arrangement with the owner and bought the shop, renamed it and focused on the most profitable customers. They kept only the best machines and let the previous owner sell off the older equipment. With this renewed focus on better controls, customer service and being selective about bringing in the right kind of work, things started getting better. But TJ and Seth didn’t like the E2 ERP system software and felt like it was a weak link in the company. Their biggest complaints about the software were:
East Branch improved their profitability using ProShop
“ProShop has become the backbone of our company and has allowed us to make significant improvements in throughput, company organization, cost savings, and overall company profitability. It has helped in so many ways that we never even considered before. It’s evident that ProShop was designed and built by people who ran the same type of business we do. They just get it, and it has made a huge difference to us as a small family run machine shop. We’re very excited about the future of East Branch.”
Irongate can’t imagine life without ProShop
“We were using E2 and it was our first ERP system, and it was a pretty good fit for when we first started. We found after about 5-6 years we started really bumping our head on the ceiling with the capabilities and we were really starting to outgrow it. A couple years later we were more than just bumping our heads we were really jammed up against the ceiling and it was really starting to hold us back. We’ve had ProShop for just about a year now and we’ve seen efficiency increases through every aspect of the shop and we can’t imagine living without it. Making that transition was much simpler than we thought it would be….Once people saw how great it was, it was kind of like a freight train, we couldn’t even stop the progress” ”
Campbell dropped their lead time using ProShop
We had planned to on-board ProShop in the 4th Quarter and launch in 2019. A sudden in-flux of work was looking unmanageable. In March of 2018, I requested that we move up our timeline. We launched July 2, 2018. Everyone’s workload immediately thinned out. They were sharing information and tips. After the first two months we had enough data to see that our KPIs were trending in a very positive direction. Our lead times dropped from 6-8 weeks down to 4 weeks ARO. We regularly pulled off 2 week lead times. ProShop was our secret sauce. ProShop was everything they promised it would be and more. It’s an extremely deep system that gives you customizability across the board.”
Dynamic Fabrication changed their company culture using ProShop
“So far all I can say is that you guys have put together a very very very good package. I have been under extreme duress for picking this package, by my employees and investor. We are now able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And most importantly, I have been able to show our customers from Raytheon, Aerojet RocketDyne, Orbital ATK, SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin the software package called ProShop we are running as they have come by to audit us over the last two months. They have all walked away impressed and we are still at the early stages. I have even shown some potential clients of ProShop as well and they too have walked away impressed!!! In order to be the best you have to team up with the best. Thank you!”
3D Industries drives improvement using ProShop
“I can’t explain how sincere I am with this. ProShop is incredible! As a machine shop owner, there were always times that I wanted to quit and give up. The solution to how to make my business run more smoothly, without a million fires seemed elusive for years. I was working too many hours under too much stress. And I’ve seen the same thing with dozens of other shop owners I know well. This is systemic in the machine shop world. I’ve seen and tried lots of other ERP systems, and none of them help. They probably make it worse. ProShop has helped us change the whole culture of the company. People are now thinking ahead, thinking more strategically, making sure their work is done right the first time. Thank you for building ProShop! It’s made a huge difference for us and I’ll be forever grateful.”
“Best Investment For Company”
“Our On-time delivery has increased 30-40% believe it or not. Employees are actually INVOLVED with the QMS because it’s all there. We actually have machinists filling out NCR’s when the problem happens. And filling out detailed reports with pictures. We find out about the problem instantaneous. There are constant areas in the shop where we can’t believe how we were operating before. The integration between all the modules from Estimating, to Orders, to Preventative Maintenance, to the Quality module is so deep it’s mind blowing! ProShop has been a total gamechanger for us!”
JobBOSS is one of the systems that we replace the most, so the implementation of ProShop from JobBOSS is very smooth. The one quote that stands out the most about replacing E2 comes from our customer at G-Zero Manufacturing:
“Prior to purchasing ProShop, we were using JobBOSS ERP system. We had a lot of difficulties in maintaining a good schedule that would be accurate so we can forecast on our workload, be positive on when we’re gonna get our items to our customers, and we just constantly were fighting with that. And so that started us to search, to see what else was out there that can help us to meet our customer’s needs. We realized we’d had our previous ERP system for eight years and we still weren’t having any advance in improving in our scheduling, so we were having difficulties on seeing what this current status of each job was, where it was at, how soon we were gonna be finished with it, and it would just wasn’t as robust as what we needed for our system. So when I saw the demo [of ProShop], I was very impressed with the ability to track and see live real time where each job was, which status it was in each operation, where we were not able to follow before, it was more of just a system that we had was more current on beginning to end of a job, it wasn’t anything in between, it started, and then it was completed. I had no idea we ‘re falling behind in which operations and ProShop really was just amazing at how you can tell each operation its status, how far they were in that operation, we could see if they’re meeting their goals, if it’s falling behind, if we’re gonna need to work some overtime to catch up on jobs, it was just amazingly more robust“
“Many of the conclusions I come to as a witness to what is happening in manufacturing are anecdotal: impressions based on patterns I notice in what shop owners are saying or seem to be giving their attention to. The following conclusion is an example of that. It seems to me that 2020 has been — among many other things — a year for ERP.”… Read the full article using the button below!
East Branch is able to manage all of their data in one place with ProShop
“We used to run a JobBOSS and then we switched to E2 shortly thereafter, and E2 was working for a while, but as the company grew and our customer’s requirements grew, we found ourselves spending
more time managing the system. Overall it was the total management of all our data that really helped us choose ProShop.”
G-Zero is able to have more visability with ProShop
“We ended up getting rid of three different Excel spreadsheets that we were using. One that was enhancing our schedule from JobBOSS that we had to use, one for purchasing and then
one for assembly items. So all those went away and now everything is done strictly paperless, right on the internet, so we can see live in each machine, and what we’re doing.”
3D found that ProShop was ready to go, right out of the box
“I’ve been through usage and in some cases implementations of JobBOSS, Plex, E2, Epicor 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. So out of the box ProShop is ready to go.”
