Starr Manufacturing has been a trusted ASME pressure vessel manufacturer and fabricator for structural machine bases and diverse industrial equipment since 1965. Our story is one of early technological adoption and continuous improvement.
Back in the late 1980s, we were among the pioneers in adopting PCs in our office, and not long after, we embraced ERP software running on MS-DOS, if you can believe it!
As our manufacturing and engineering capabilities expanded, we constantly sought to enhance visibility and automation with our ERP system. Three years ago, we made a pivotal decision to transition from our long-standing ERP system of 30 years to Genius ERP, aiming to gain greater data visibility and automate our BOM data entry.
Our previous ERP solution lacked effective CAD integration, a crucial component for our custom equipment designs catering to energy, oil and gas, and other industries. With multilayer assemblies and BOMs often exceeding 300 items—and sometimes even reaching 1000 items—the risk of human error and our pace of business necessitated a more efficient solution. Enter Genius ERP’s ETM/CAD2BOM.
The ETM/CAD2BOM integration in Genius revolutionized our workflow by seamlessly transferring digital BOMs from Inventor and SolidWorks into Genius ERP. This automation ensures data accuracy and completeness, significantly reducing our manual data entry burden. As a result, our throughput potential increased, and lead times from order entry to material purchasing were cut down by several days. Fewer BOM listing errors meant fewer production surprises, enabling us to maintain our production schedule more effectively and reduce overtime.
Our engineers now spend more time designing and less time on manual data entry, allowing us to focus on selling projects and creating new designs. The efficiency gains from ETM/CAD2BOM have been a game-changer, enabling us to leave manual data entry behind.
The Genius Production Dashboard is another tool that has transformed our operations. We use it as a digital town hall, where all users can share production statuses, material expediting needs, and critical schedule milestones. With added custom fields, our dashboard replaces numerous individual reports, bringing all departmental eyes to one common place. This unified view ensures that we all pull in the same direction.
Genius Web Analytics has also been instrumental in our success. With minimal SQL database and programming knowledge, we developed custom dashboards that visualize raw data from our ERP system quickly and accurately. For instance, we have created a dashboard to visualize the active production time punches, which allows supervisors to ensure employees are on the correct work orders, monitor project elapsed time, and detect issues early.
We also created an early warning dashboard highlighting work orders nearing or exceeding planned hours. This real- time visibility into labor time helps supervisors manage labor overruns proactively. Our Sales dashboard, another major time-saver, compiles and visualizes monthly and annual invoiced sales and open orders with a single click. This efficiency has eliminated hours of weekly data manipulation for our sales team, enabling us to take on additional work confidently.
Two other features that have made a huge difference to our implementation are Renaming Items and self-managed Import/Export tools. Our Items library has over 50,000 items, and they were far from perfectly named. Being able to rename vs. being stuck with a bad material ID is huge. With Genius, we could bulk update families, descriptions ourselves, which made everything possible.
It would have taken an extra year to manually enter all of the Items and correct them entry by entry in our old ERP. It was either live with the bad data or correct it line by line, screen by screen. With our previous ERP system, we could query and export, but we could not write directly to the database. That would have required consultants and billable hours. We didn’t even know Genius had these features until we made the switch, and discovering them was a game changer for our operations.
Genius ERP’s real-time analytics have fundamentally enhanced our operations and boosted our sales. Overall, the transformation brought by Genius ERP has not only increased our efficiency but also empowered us to make informed decisions, driving our ongoing success and positioning us for future growth.
As a Sales Manager at Starr Manufacturing, Inc. in Vienna, Ohio, I have been dedicated to driving growth and success since March 2006. With over 18 years of experience in sales leadership, I specialize in developing strategic initiatives that foster long-term business relationships and achieve substantial revenue goals.
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Find out how Genius ERP can simplify your manufacturing.
Find out how Genius ERP can simplify your manufacturing.
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