Miller Welding and Machine Manages Growth with Less Manpower

The year was 1963. The Dodgers, behind the arm of Sandy Koufax, beat the defending champion Yankees for the World Series, while the first Super Bowl wouldn’t be played for another four years. The astronaut, Gordon Cooper, became the first human to spend more than a day in space, and the last American to fly there alone. And, there wasn’t a single Toyota to be found anywhere in the United States. A new America was in transition, maturing in the age of postwar prosperity. It was also the year David Miller opened the doors to the Miller Welding and Machine Company (MWM).

Today, over four decades later, David still opens the doors to the shop, usually showing up before his wife, his five children and five grandchildren who also work there alongside him. With three generations of Millers involved in the day-to-day functions of the company, the family maintains a solid foundation of American working tradition, while also looking to the future for the operations of their two Northeastern Pennsylvania plants: the 98,000 sq. ft. Sandy Lick facility, and the massive 134,000 sq. ft. Maplevale plant. To meet the inevitable management advancements ushered in with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, MWM  turned to the leader in ERP software development-Global Shop Solutions.

According to MWM’s IT Manager Eric Miller (and David’s grandson), taking the family company into the 21st Century with the robust Global Shop ERP software system was not only important for short-term bottom line considerations in a dual-plant configuration, but was necessary for long-term company survivability in an age of globalization. “The problem with our business, especially right now in a busy global economy, is that the minute we get on-time, our customers push more work to us and drive us to be back on-time,” Miller states. It’s an ironic fact found on the road to success: the better you get at on-time delivery of orders, the more your customers ask of you in order volume and delivery speed. That is to say, the reward for throughput efficiency is more and more pressure to improve upon customer delivery mandates. For MWM, their Global Shop software system is able to build efficiencies into manufacturing operations-efficiencies that result in the saving of WIP time to meet customer delivery expectations.

Global Shop Solutions ERP Software Reduces Overhead

MWM is an industrial manufacturer that produces heavy steel fabrications-anything from one pound up to 40,000 pounds. They’re a fully integrated shop and a single-source solution for customers needing high quality industrial fabrication, finishing, assembly, or all of these things. They are an on-time OEM outsourcing operation, an industrial processor capable of producing one or thousands of parts to spec, and an industrial refurbisher that revives parts to working order. Inventory control is their prime focus in controlling overhead, and for MWM, Global Shop is a perfect fit. Also, like MWM, Global Shop is a single-source provider. “It’s a powerful system where you can do everything that is related to the manufacturing process-from accounting to payroll, job tracking, scheduling. It’s simply everything we need in one place and in real time output. Global Shop has made us a much more efficient operation and has allowed us to produce more parts and maintain our on-time delivery at a high rate,” Miller states.
 
On any given day, Miller Welding has dozens of work orders flowing through to the shop floor. However, before acquiring Global Shop, maximizing plant capacity for the greatest efficiencies was not always easy, or even considered. In the past, backward scheduling of man and material for such volume was a major headache for management. Without every aspect of the enterprise running in synchronization through the use of real time data, scheduling of man and material becomes inherently inaccurate and time consuming. As Miller observes, “Before Global Shop, we were using another ERP package. As we grew into a larger company, we started running into issues with the software because it was more job-based rather than inventory-based.” It was at this point, in 2002, that MWM turned to Global Shop to solve their growing inventory control problems, as well as the inefficiencies springing up throughout their plants as a result of the increased growth.

“What Global Shop has done for us is to increase our throughput and efficiencies dramatically. For example, in terms of our direct rates to indirect, before Global Shop, we used to have three buyers–now I have one buyer doing three times what those three buyers accomplished in the same amount of time. So, with Global Shop, we’re able to drastically reduce our overhead compared to what had been going on before we acquired Global Shop software.” And, in a total plant space of 232,000 square feet, that’s a lot of overhead.

Next Week: “Global Shop Solutions Means Customer Care”

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 9:21 am and is filed under ERP Success Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.