Specialty Screw produces custom cold-headed fasteners and offers a complete range of secondary operations, including roll threading and forming, drilling, tapping, shaving, trimming, pointing, heat treating and plating. Specialty Screw is impressed with the overall connectivity and seamlessness within Vantage, and they've found Vantage very easy to use.
“We produce custom cold-headed fasteners -- the kind you can’t buy in a hardware store,” says Patrick Winter, information services manager at Specialty Screw, Rockford, Illinois. A privately held company founded in 1953, Specialty also offers a complete range of secondary operations including roll threading and forming, drilling, tapping, shaving, trimming, pointing, heat treating and plating.
Specialty’s customers are tier-one and tier-two suppliers to the major auto makers, as well as manufacturers of security systems, molded rubber products, outdoor power equipment and recreational products. Specialty serves a variety of other markets as well.
“As a job shop, we usually start with small orders of 5,000-10,000 fasteners, and we often succeed in increasing them to high-volume, repetitive work,” says Winter.
Although Specialty works mainly in carbon steel, it also produces fasteners from brass, copper, bronze and stainless steel. Since cold-formed fasteners are extruded, impacted or upset, the process eliminates material waste. Specialty also offers customers superior strength and durability. The fasteners range from 0.138” to 5/8” in diameter and from .25” to 6” in length.
Winter says the company began an exhaustive research process when it decided to update its plant management software. The need was obvious. “Our custom software system was 10 years old and lacked shop floor data collection, payroll, quoting and an acceptable scheduling system,” explains Winter. “It also was not Y2K compliant.”
“Each department made a ‘wish list’ of desired features -- the list grew to more than 100 items,” says Winter. “For example, the shipping department wanted the ability to print bar code labels for cartons.”
This wish list was compared to the software available from the top ERP (enterprise resource planning) players. Because of Specialty’s strong presence in the automotive industry, vertical experience in that industry was important. “Most software companies were out of our size and price range -- asking up to $1 million for an off-the-shelf system, plus consulting fees,” adds Winter. “On the other end of the spectrum, a lot of small software companies were selling code that hadn’t been written yet.”
Specialty’s review team also studied software rankings, such as a “Top 100” survey in Manufacturing Systems magazine. The team enlisted the help of a consultant and also researched software trends and background information on the Internet. BuySmart, a software program designed to aid the selection process, was also used. “We learned the background and terminology necessary to ask the right questions,” explains Winter. More than 20 employees -- almost twenty percent of the company -- attended meetings to review the top contenders.
“We wanted a system that would be easy to learn and install. We didn’t want the implementation to bring our company to its knees,” says Winter. “Everyone felt Vantage would work in their own area. Features like the graphical user interface and Visual Scheduling put it ahead of the competition.”
For scheduling jobs, Specialty’s production manager was using a written schedule posted on the wall, with flip charts and movable markers. “He had often wished a computer could help manage scheduling,” notes Winter.
Once the decision to purchase Vantage was made, Specialty began preparing to go “live” on the start of the company’s fiscal year, July 1, 1997. The company had weekly progress meetings and dedicated a conference room to implementation activities.
“We set up a training center with 12 PCs (including light pens) in the conference room,” explains Winter. Operators practiced clocking in and out, and logging in and out of jobs. “One of the PCs was hooked up to a projector, and any questions were brought up on the screen and worked out.”
These computers were also used for data entry to update master files, active orders and work in process. To familiarize employees with Vantage, sales and production personnel alike entered this data, even volunteering to come in on Saturdays to help accelerate the process. “Employees learned Vantage quickly and found it easy to use,” notes Winter.
Winter believes the implementation process took Specialty a little longer because the company redesigned its chart of accounts and part numbering system at the same time. “The changeover was a unique opportunity to correct and improve other elements of our system,” says Winter.
Specialty made a number of one-time adjustment transactions to ensure data wasn’t lost during the implementation. All of these were posted on June 28, enabling them to be easily tracked. The night of June 30, the 12 PCs were moved from the conference room into the shop floor and hooked up. “We didn’t try and run parallel systems, which would have been confusing” explains Winter. “Our approach was like the Nike advertising slogan -- ‘Just Do It’.”
The overall connectivity and seamlessness within Vantage impressed Winter. “It’s very easy to navigate and find information. With our old UNIX server and dumb terminals, navigation required a lot of keypunching and ‘backing out’ of one area to access information somewhere else. Vantage’s graphic interface enables us to easily move from one inquiry screen to another with just the click of a mouse,” says Winter. “And by simply entering a few letters of the customer’s name, you can easily link to all the information you need. It’s very user-friendly and easy to use.” Once Specialty started using Visual Scheduling, Winter says the paper-based scheduling system was “quickly junked.”
Specialty uses Vantage’s Document Management module to link all quotes to scanned images of customers’ prints, and manufactured parts are linked to the engineering CAD system. “We can easily view any part’s CAD drawing along with its specifications,” notes Winter. “For example, one part drawing may correspond to 20-30 drawings of tools necessary to make that part.”
Winter says Specialty also appreciates the ability to design custom reports quickly and easily using the Progress report builder. “After our first week, we designed a time and attendance report,” says Winter. “We also created month-end reports. Vantage’s graphic interface helped cut design time on these reports down to minutes or hours instead of weeks or months,” adds Winter. “It’s been a very pleasant surprise, and just another reason we’re confident we made the right choice with Vantage.”
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