Jobshop makes “monumental” contribution to manufacturer’s success

Aish Technologies used to process around 4,000 work orders a year. Since bringing in Jobshop production planning and control, the same number of staff now manage 10,000, according to operations director and company secretary Nigel Barnes. "We recognised that the business was heavily dependent on non value-added staff to make it work. We were carrying a high burden of overheads to make the company function as it did," explains Barnes. "Our long-term solution was to say, if we're going to implement Jobshop, it had to provide the capacity to grow the business without increasing this burden," he continues. "As we always utilise the tools we have to the fullest possible extent, we've grown the business [with Jobshop], increasing turnover to £12m, and we haven't needed to increase staff." Barnes states that Aish uses many of Jobshop's functions, including sales order processing, MRP, purchase orders, work orders, scheduling, shop floor data capture, materials control, costing, and system management. He also says that JobShop has always been willing to create additional functionality, and include it as part of a future releases. He cites Aish's costing module, which needed to reflect contract work and WIP. "We became heavily involved in the specification and layout, and then we supported Jobshop's work in developing it, through in-depth testing. Following on from that, we now often undertake testing of other new functionality to assist Jobshop with its ongoing development," says Barnes "Jobshop has made a monumental contribution to our recent success. We couldn't have grown the business without the step change improvements in both procurement and progressing the scheduling work load without Jobshop," he concludes.