Aerospace

Sealth Aero Marine (SAM), located in Mill Creek, WA is an aerospace OEM who designs and manufactures latches and other precision machined hardware for the commercial, military and VIP jet market. They converted from a traditional accounting based ERP system to ProShop and have seen many benefits in combining all their company and quality operations into a comprehensive ERP/MES and QMS system.

Benefits
General Manager, Rich Olson explains how SAM benefits from ProShop in multiple ways. “Working with the guys at ProShop was a huge development for our company. First and foremost, it instantly revealed many examples of waste in our production process,” he explains. “For example, we were spending a huge amount of time not knowing where our jobs were at, expediting jobs, pulling off partials to make deliveries and spending way too much time in our planning process. With ProShop we reduced our list of late orders by 90% and increased our planning throughput by 400%. This allows us to have a much better on-time delivery performance for our customers. We also freed up people from expediting roles that were redirected to more value added work – another significant cost savings.”

“I can’t describe enough of what it is like to literally see everything from a single desktop. It’s a brilliant, brilliant software!” says Rich. SAM was able to eliminate their daily production meetings as their list of late orders was slashed to nearly zero. All employees could see everything they needed to make smart decisions to get jobs done on-time for their clients. “We have better visibility of performance of all the jobs on our machines which allows us to streamline production rates and boost throughput with the same staff. By focusing on production efficiency we can get jobs through the machines and assembly stations faster. We’ve documented all of our work instructions in ProShop which eliminates paper job travelers, so we get faster setups with people who don’t need to be as skilled. This helps in a tight labor market. We also use ProShop’s In-Process QC module to check our parts while they’re being made. This allows us to catch quality problems faster which reduces scrap and rework, helping save costs and stay on-time with deliveries.”

“We get audited quite often. Whether it’s for AS9100, Boeing, the FAA, Gulfstream or others, and the one thing they always all say is that they’ve never seen a more complete robust software in any of the other companies they audit.” says Rich proudly. Having such a smooth running and digital QMS system is a big selling point with clients. It provides a high level of confidence when they see how organized everything is, and you can provide any quality metric or data in seconds. What have been the results? “Since implementing ProShop, our annual sales have increased 125% while our workforce has only increased by 15%.” Says Rich. “Therefore, in six years, we’ve more than doubled our sales with essentially the same number of employees. We couldn’t have done that without ProShop. I believe we’d need about 30% more people today if we were still using our old system. ProShop is backbone of our organization. Without it days would be long!”

Nezkot Sees Major Gains in Throughput, Reduced Lead Times, and Leaner QMS with ProShop

Nezkot Precision Tooling & Engineering is a leading defense and aerospace contractor in Melbourne Australia.  They provide high precision tooling and production machining for OEM and Tier 1 aerospace and defense contractors.

As Nezkot grew with more sophisticated requirements and larger programs, they required a more complete manufacturing software solution to replace the multiple disparate systems they were using.  When they started looking for a manufacturing ERP system that was better suited for their more complex business and manufacturing requirements, they were underwhelmed with the choices they found in legacy ERP systems.  It seemed as though those systems weren’t actually designed for what they needed them to do.

They wanted a comprehensive shop management solution that would allow them to handle virtually all aspects of their business and manufacturing processes.  But just as importantly, they wanted a system that would allow them to scale their business easily without adding more overhead.  They read about ProShop online in January 2017 and requested a demo.  After just one demo, it was clear to their team that ProShop’s highly efficient and process driven manufacturing workflow would support their aggressive growth plans while not requiring additional staff.  Additionally, ProShop would combine and replace nearly all the other systems they had been using.

They implemented ProShop a few weeks later and were up and running in just 30 days after launch.  Time was of the essence as their AS9100 Rev D audit was just 6 months away.  They immediately merged their quality manual, procedures and other documents into ProShop’s completely integrated and paperless QMS modules.  Six short months later they became the very first company in Australia to become Rev D certified using ProShop’s 100% paperless QMS system!

In addition to helping them achieve Rev D certification, the results for increased efficiency in the shop quickly exceeded even their aggressive expectations.  Here are a few of the metrics they shared with the ProShop team:

• Overall Company Throughput – Nezkot is now able to process 30% more jobs with the same staff than they were able to process before ProShop. The highly refined workflow processes built into ProShop allow them to spend less time processing jobs, recording and documenting information, and more time doing value added work.
• Lead time from Customer PO to Work Order – This critical and non-value added time has been reduced by 10X! What used to take on average several hours, is now done in a few minutes. This allows faster deliveries to customers, more nimble operations, and higher profits with less overhead spent on each job.
• Increased Capacity for Complex Jobs – Nezkot can now manage orders with hundreds of line items with all different processing specifications. With the built-in tools that ProShop provides to process large orders with very exacting and complicated specifications, the team at Nezkot is able to confidently take on larger complex contracts with confidence that all details will be handled perfectly.
• More Efficient AS9100 Quality Program – ProShop’s QMS modules are completely integrated into the rest of the ERP and MES modules. And being 100% paperless, this combination offers Nezkot unprecedented insights and automatic reporting of all quality metrics.  Maintaining and improving the QMS is significantly improved with automatic workflows for approval of revision changes of documents.  Long gone are hours spent wading through external documents that were unrelated to the core operations of the company.

After just 9 months, ProShop has become a core part of the company culture and helped Nezkot become more organized, scale faster, impress clients, and win more business.  Auditors from their customers have given them very positive feedback that ProShop is the most robust QMS system they have ever seen.  An auditor from Germany’s largest defense contractor even said that “ProShop is way better than our SAP system!”  That’s the kind of feedback we love to hear.

The team at Nezkot is glad they discovered ProShop and didn’t settle for the inefficiencies of a legacy ERP system.  The future indeed looks bright at Nezkot and they are well positioned to take on larger and more complex projects and significant growth.