Tru-Form

"Tru-Form’s on-time percentage went up from the high 70’s to the mid and upper 90’s…Since our first contact with GSS, and now even seven years later, we’ve been impressed by the great flexibility of the Global Shop software system."

Mark Tiedeman, Vice President, Tru-Form Tooling & Manufacturing

All too often in manufacturing today, you hear the story about the niched operation that narrowed themselves out of business. When the demand for their unique product ebbs, when a specialized part becomes obsolete, it’s sometimes far too late to retool into a different line of production. The key to survival for many has been, all along, the need to remain flexible and diverse in manufacturing capabilities. For Tru-Form Tool & Manufacturing of Santa Fe Springs, Calif., diversity of capability has been their hallmark for a long, long time. One look at their vast and varied machining line quickly lets you know that Tru-Form is up to the task of manufacturing just about anything made of metal.

From the production of high quality torsion, extension, or compression springs, to complex wire assemblies, tooling, metal stamping, and prototyping, Tru-Form offers one-stop shopping for their customers looking to quickly and efficiently produce quality parts, assemblies, and engineering assessments. With all of their many operations under one roof, Tru-Form is able to meet a wide array of client needs because of one major attribute—their flexibility to find solutions for nearly every customer needing manufactured or make-to-order metalwork jobs. To help them maintain order and consistently high quality while also meeting delivery dates with regularity, Tru-Form uses an ERP software system that has proven to be just as flexible for them—the Global Shop Solutions manufacturing software system.

According to Tru-Form’s Vice President Mark Tiedeman, manufacturing life before Global Shop was a life spent in wasted time, effort, and paper. "We’ve been a Global Shop customer for over seven years now, and before Global Shop, we were operating in the caveman era. We were making photocopies of a handwritten jacket with handwritten steps, and that document was what was going out to the shop. Of course, we kept losing the routers. People would throw them in the trash, or they were getting stuck to forklifts, and that’s when we decided to go out and find a manufacturing software system for job shop operations like ours." In their search for an ERP software system, Tru-Form made flexibility their number one criteria. Whatever system they acquired must be as flexible as Tru-Form itself. Tru-Form looked at many ERP software offerings. But as Tiedeman points out, it was both Global Shop’s value and flexibility that won the day for them.

"What we really liked about Global Shop over their competitors was its flexibility and being able to adjust their software to meet our needs. And, we continue to be impressed by their great flexibility seven years later. They listened to us and that was invaluable to us as a company. This is something we couldn’t find in another manufacturing software company, and it was the most important part of our decision."

The flexibility that Global Shop brings to the Tru-Form operation is made most apparent in the prototyping areas of the plant. Here, clients bring a varied assortment of job types, often short run assemblies, with minimal tooling investments in order to shorten time to market. In these tasks, Global Shop is able to produce job production performance analyses for cost reduction purposes. Overall, Tru-Form prototyping services give clients a sense of manufacturability before full production is ordered. Global Shop produces the reports necessary to make informed decisions about bottom-line margins for such processes.

When jobs require a varied process work order, Global Shop offers the flexibility necessary to quickly and efficiently move parts and assemblies around the shop floor. "We have nine Global Shop computer workstations located throughout the shop. We make great use of the bill of material because we have jobs where we need to make a part in one area of the plant, and then quickly move it for work in another department," Tiedeman explains. "Because we have so many diverse jobs going on at the same time, the Global Shop system really helps our inventory clerk keep track of what we have and what we need in terms of material. And, once the router is generated within the Global Shop system, it makes everything run very smoothly with no more lost documents on the shop floor."

A significant advantage for Tru-Form is in using Global Shop to build increasing on-time percentage rates and monitoring labor performance. For example, in the seven years they’ve been using Global Shop, Tru-Form’s on-time percentage went up from the high 70’s to the mid and upper 90’s. For Tiedeman, their Global Shop software has been responsible for decreasing indirect labor costs and increasing bottom-line profit margins. "Global Shop keeps our labor accountable for what they’re working on. It tracks labor hours in a day, how fast a job runs, are they running it at the right speed, what our workers do with their time in both direct and indirect labor terms. So we’re able to look at this labor performance information when it comes time to give raises and promotions. Global Shop is a great labor evaluation tool for us," Tiedeman observes.

As a general cost accounting tool, Tru-Form will typically take anywhere from three to five finished jobs each week and send them back into the Global Shop estimating/quoting module for post-production analyses. They then use their Global Shop system to back-track the whole production process for each job to see factors such as how fast the job ran, how much was paid for material, the appropriate job lead time, on-time delivery performance, and all of the other variables that originally went into costing the project. Tiedeman adds, "Global Shop helps us determine what sort of profit we have on any particular job and to see if we need to raise the price for future sales orders of the job."

Tru-Form also uses Global Shop’s unique Shop Floor Tracking module as an important tool in their customer service area. When a Tru-Form customer calls and asks for a status report on parts or assemblies, customer service staff can simply go into the Global Shop system and see where the job is in terms of completion.

"With the Global Shop Time and Attendance module," Tiedeman explains, "Everybody here clocks in on the system and we do payroll off that information. We can always go into the WIP screen and see who’s working on which job, how long they’ve been on it, and when we can expect them to finish it. I just can’t say enough about how the color-coded Time and Attendance screen makes our direct and indirect cost analysis so much easier for us to use." This is especially important to Tru-Form as they create and acquire companies as affiliates within the control of their parent company. In such a situation—increasingly becoming more common in business today—the CFO must often monitor the financial aspects of three, four, five, and sometimes more affiliate companies enveloped within the larger organization. In such instances, Global Shop is very well-suited in the production of both intersecting and parallel lines of operation and finance.

"One of the main reasons we chose Global Shop over all of the other ERP software systems out there," Tiedeman remembers, "was because of their excellent reputation for customer service—a reputation that has been proven time and again in their relationship with us. We’ve found that we can call them anytime for questions or help with the system. If we need help figuring out a new report function or something in the upgrades, they’re a very responsive company and will call us back quickly with help." The Global Shop reputation for quality customer service begins, for every customer, from the first point of contact with the company. Once the software is acquired, painstaking efforts are made for a thorough and smooth implementation. At each step of the way, Global Shop professionals ensure questions are answered, procedures explained, and functions clarified for a smooth ERP integration.

According to Tiedeman, "After we acquired the software, Global Shop spent quite a bit of time out here with us making sure the system was fully implemented into our working operation. Since then, we’ve been incorporating various aspects of the software little by little, and now we see results in our on-time delivery percentage, our quality, and the quotes that we present to the customer. Perhaps most importantly, our customer service reaction time has been improved with Global Shop because our customer service people can give immediate answers to questions without having to consult with managers on the floor. The information is always real-time output, and we can find out about our customer’s jobs quickly—we don’t have to call them back or put them on hold."

For Tru-Form, the proof of quality is always in the finished product, and the seven years they’ve been using Global Shop has given them all the evidence they need to realize the many advantages found in its One-System ERP software. As Tiedeman puts it, "All in all, it’s been a very successful relationship with Global Shop."