Liberty Brass Turning Company ERP Case Study

The Challenge

By the late 1990s, Liberty Brass's legacy accounting system had become a major constraint on growth and competitiveness. The older software was not only outdated - it also could not handle the year-2000 transition and lacked the comprehensive functionality needed to manage a modern, global manufacturing operation. This left Liberty Brass with limited visibility into production, costing, inventory and outsourcing decisions, creating inefficiencies and limiting the leadership team’s ability to make profitable pricing and production choices. As global competition increased, Liberty Brass needed an integrated system that could provide accurate job costing, real-time job history and reliable shop floor data to help them retain margins and thrive in a challenging market.

The Solution

To address these challenges, Liberty Brass implemented Global Shop Solutions ERP software as a complete replacement for its legacy system. The new ERP system brought together accounting, CRM, inventory, production and job costing into one unified platform. This gave Liberty Brass timely access to historical job data and precise costing information that had previously been obscured by manual processes and disconnected software. With Global Shop Solutions, Liberty Brass was able to capture, store and analyze customer, vendor, and internal operational information quickly and easily. The CRM tools helped sales teams refine customer relationships and real-time production visibility allowed executives to monitor shop floor status from anywhere. The job cost accounting functionality in particular became a cornerstone of the company’s decision-making process, as it provided detailed work order histories that could be referenced in quoting, pricing and production planning.

The Results

The impact of Global Shop Solutions was felt quickly and tangibly. Within the first six months, Liberty Brass identified a large production run where the historical job cost data showed that proceeding with the job as originally planned would have resulted in a $23,000. Armed with precise insights from the ERP system, the team chose to outsource the work instead, converting what would have been a loss into a$30,000 profit - a $53,000 financial swing on a single order driven by better data. Over time, this level of insight and decision support has been replicated across multiple jobs, helping Liberty Brass consistently avoid unprofitable work and improve margins. Furthermore, the ERP platform enabled the company to streamline front-office operations, with just a CFO and two office staff managing all critical administrative functions thanks to system integration and automation. With Global Shop Solutions at the center of its operations, Liberty Brass has transitioned from struggling with disconnected legacy systems to running a lean, data-driven business capable of competing in global markets.