Metal Fabrication ERP Software

If your shop predominantly services local manufacturing industries with specialized requirements or one-off jobs, simplicity in your systems is essential to your success. The perfect ERP solution will allow you to:

• Quote quickly and accurately – Customers often need same-day jobs and so quote turnaround time is short and must be accurate or it will affect profitability.
• Increase profitability – With real-time insight into material and labor usage. As you may not have repeat orders from the same customer, ensuring each job is profitable is imperative to the bottom line.
• Perform ad-hoc scheduling and CTP – Customers may walk in with a rush job that needs to be completed the same day – can you meet your deadlines and does it impact other work? Using a CTP system allows you to create a balance between what you can produce and what customers and clients are requesting.
• Sub-contract with confidence – Because this is a capital-intensive industry, many custom metal fabricators are not big enough to own specialty machinery, thus having to rely on sub-contracting to provide a ‘full’ service/end result for their customers (coating, specialized cutting, etc.).

As a project fabricator, you might specialize in servicing a specific industry such as construction, aerospace, forestry, oil and gas. You may have a custom fabrication department that services individual customers, but your primary business is servicing the needs of a specific industry. You therefore have more sophisticated requirements and want a solution that facilitates:

• Accurate quoting – Having larger contracts, you need the quote to be complete and accurate up front in order to maintain profitability.
• Creating BOMs/Jobs based on customer CAD drawings – It is a time-consuming task to capture complicated CAD details into BOMs into an ERP. CADTalk helps alleviate this.
• Profitability – Dependent on material availability and the production processes.
• Compliance and quality as they often have to adhere to standards stipulated by the industries you serve (such as Aerospace) – Heat-tracking and the ability to do quick recalls (mock for compliance) is important. Your ability to provide documentation that validates inspections throughout the manufacturing process and meets quality specifications with the final product is often needed.