Schutte & Koerting has more than a century of experience in the design and manufacture of steam jet vacuum systems, steam jet heaters, exhausters and compressors, scrubber systems, desuperheaters, thermocompressors, eductors, ejectors, and valves.

The Trevose, PA company has been manufacturing custom-engineered equipment for the petrochemical, food, pulp and paper, refinery and wastewater treatment industries for over 130 years. Unfortunately, their computer systems seemed nearly as old as the company itself.

Operating on an old IBM AS/400 with a “green screen” character-based MAPICS application that was antiquated and not at all user friendly, the company realized that they had to make a change and modernize their business processes. They made the commitment to invest in updated solutions across the board and sought a single vendor that could meet their network and software needs.

Seeking a Modern Solution
Schutte & Koerting hoped to find ways to streamline their production process and eliminate time consuming manual job costing on spreadsheets. They wanted to eliminate duplicate databases that tracked the many different elements of their business process.

Their goal was to establish effective communication between manufacturing and production, sales and engineering, as well as from manufacturing to sales, through automated alerts about the progress of particular jobs. Particularly important was the functionality to track cost on each work ticket and handle special or expedited jobs. They needed to track CAD drawings back to the work ticket. And on top of it all, they wanted timely financial statements on demand.

The New Approach
In the first half of 2007, Schutte & Koerting embarked on an ERP selection process. CompuData recommended a comprehensive solution, including Sage MAS 200 with JobOps job management software, new file, email and application servers, an enterprise-level backup system and a new secure firewall.

JobOps provides a comprehensive solution for automating job management functions. Specifically designed for manufacturing organizations that make-to-order or engineer-to-order, the core functions of JobOps include job estimating, order management, job planning, purchasing, bill of materials management, scheduling, job costing and tracking. CompuData also recommended the JobOps Product Configurator, a toolset that automates the building of custom products with an easy to use graphical selection wizard, the JobOps Enhanced Scheduler, a toolset that gives users additional flexibility in focusing on scheduling and resource utilization, and JobOps Time Tracker, a toolset for accurately entering time on work tickets so that jobs can be completed quickly and profitably.

JobOps was specifically developed for and is tightly integrated into Sage Software’s award-winning Sage MAS 90 and MAS 200 accounting software solutions. Sage MAS 200 is feature-rich, easy to learn and use, offers broad accounting functionality and integrates readily with other Windows applications such as Microsoft® Word® and Excel®. This solution offers world-class financial and management reporting tools, superb customization capabilities and scalability for growing businesses.

Sage MAS 200 with JobOps was a natural fit for Schutte & Koerting. At the management level, “we were looking at functionality,” says Michael Pintozzi, President of Schutte & Koerting. “Sage MAS 200 with JobOps hit the key factors that we were looking for.”

A Unanimous Decision
By September, when management had narrowed the selection to just two choices, Schutte & Koerting invited CompuData to come in and present their solution to the company’s 30 employees. After all, says Jacquie Ponticelli, Schutte & Koerting’s controller, “they were the ones who would have to use the system every day.”

By the end of the presentation, the decision was clear. “The CompuData solutions were selected by every employee here,” notes Neil Hughes, Vice President of Schutte & Koerting. The unanimous decision was credited to the fact that CompuData’s Sage MAS 200 and JobOps recommendations were clearly the most user-friendly choice.

Quick Change
CompuData converted the data from the old MAPICS system, including accounting, customer, inventory over 70,000 bill of materials and routings. Schutte & Koerting’s staff completed their training at CompuData’s Authorized Training Center and concluded a very successful conference room pilot program before going live on the new system.

Less than three months after the solution was selected, before the ball dropped in Times Square to ring in the new year, the implementation was complete, both on time and on budget.

“Everyone has adapted to it well,” says Ponticelli. Just a little more than one month post-implementation, the company can already see changes in workflow and operations. “It’s lightened the workload for some of our departments,” she adds, pointing out that many of the company’s previously manual processes have been automated with the new software.

There have been other efficiencies as well. “We had a lot of little databases tracking a lot of little things, but now they’re all consolidated,” says Ponticelli. “There’s one central location for all information about jobs and materials.” This eliminates the need to go to paper files to retrieve that information. “That alone is a cost savings.”

Great Expectations
The new system has easy access to data for reports, easy lookup features, and uses true costing for each job to determine profitability – all features missing from their old system. The implementation of JobOps with Sage MAS 200, along with the changes to the underlying infrastructure, have given Schutte & Koerting a powerful competitive edge as an efficient and effective quality manufacturer for the power and process industries.