Customized MRP software unique to metal fab shop

Figure 1
Greg Dellinger, president of Dellinger Enterprises in Belmont, N.C., uses dual monitors in his office to oversee the company’s MRP system, Ingenuity.

Greg Dellinger’s mind is like a steel trap when it comes to Dellinger Enterprises.

The president of the family-owned and -operated company based in Belmont, N.C., has a nearly photographic memory regarding his 50,000-sq.-ft. fabrication and machining shop. The fabricator specializes in light sheet metal processing and welding, as well as CNC machining and turning of carbon steel, stainless steel, and aluminum, with two automated laser cutting cells and a robotic welding cell with modular fixturing.

“I could go ask him right now, ‘Hey, where’s the tow chain?’” said his younger brother, Jason Dellinger, vice president of Dellinger Enterprises. “And he’d say, ‘That’s in the gray box on the side of the old Freightliner.’”

Or when Jason comes to Greg inquiring, “Hey, man. We had some 11-gauge sheet metal come in the other week …”

And before Jason could finish, Greg rattles off: “It’s back on the third pallet rack over near the laser.”

Jason just shakes his head and says with a chuckle, “I don’t know how he knows where exactly everything is, but he does. He’s just trained that way.”

That kind of attention to operational detail is ingrained in Greg. It runs in the Dellinger family and has been apparent throughout the company’s 40-year history, from embracing lean manufacturing early on to helping design a uniquely customized Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) system for efficient shop floor management.

Efficiency Experts

When Greg and Jason’s father, Larry, started the company in 1978, he made efficiency the cornerstone of the business, which cut its teeth in the fiberglass industry, while maintaining an old-school way of doing things.

“Our dad used to sit at home during dinner and work things out on napkins,” Jason said. “Everything was in his head. He was constantly figuring out these numbers and everything else. And that’s where Greg started out from.”

And while similar shops around the Charlotte area traditionally performed machining under one roof and fabrication under another roof, Larry opted for a more streamlined method: running machining and fabrication in the same building, cutting out time wasted from miscommunication and runs between different locations.

Figure 2
Dellinger Enterprises Vice President Jason Dellinger uses the MRP system on the shop floor.

“My dad was unique in the fact that we did everything under one roof,” Jason said. “So, the customer could come to us with a project and we could deliver that turnkey without having to go outside of our building. It would be made, assembled, tested, wired, powered, and whatever here. The entire project.”

For years Greg was able to keep Dellinger projects organized in his head as he served as shop foreman. And while Larry ran the business behind the scenes, Greg was looking to the future, helping transition the Dellinger operation from a fiberglass fab shop to a metal fab shop in the early ’90s with the purchase of an Amada LCE 645 laser.

The ability for small to midsized shops to fabricate something like stainless steel was out of reach and considered exotic before automated laser machines and insert tools were readily available. “When these lasers came along, it kind of changed the whole ballgame,” said Jason, “because now you could cut anything you could draw. And we had one of the first [lasers] in the area then.”

It signified Dellinger’s shift into advanced technology. But that also meant no more brainstorming on dinner napkins and filing away everything in a brain. So, around 2000, Larry, seeing the writing on the wall, retired and sold the company to Greg and Jason as the industry transitioned into the computer age.

“When we took the Rolodex off our dad’s desk and put a computer up there, he just stared at it and said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with that,’” Jason said with a laugh. “And to his credit, he didn’t stand in our way on going where we wanted to take the business.”

With Larry retired and Greg taking over behind-the-scenes business operations, Dellinger needed a replacement to assume responsibilities as shop foreman and sustain Dellinger’s demanding production efficiency. And Greg’s replacement came along in an unexpected way, ultimately becoming the lifeblood of the Dellinger shop.

From Brain to Computer

While researching for an updated time clock system, Greg came across a company called ProfitFab, which services several industries, including sheet metal, plastics, machine shop, and other OEM and make-to-order manufacturers. But what Dellinger got was much more than a new clock-in system; the company got integrated MRP software—a computer-based system that creates production schedules with real-time data to organize component material deliveries with the availability of machine and labor.

Essentially, Greg looked at it as an opportunity to transfer everything stored mentally into the ProfitFab MRP system.

As Greg put it, “If it’s in my head, then it needs to be in that computer.”

But ProfitFab was just the launching pad. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, Dellinger continued to grow from a small one-off, job-to-job shop into a business that took on production contracts from larger companies like Valmet Inc., Forterra Inc., and two Daimler AG subsidiaries: Freightliner Trucks and Orion Bus Industries. While working with Daimler AG, Dellinger became a corporate Freightliner supplier while earning a Master of Quality Award and, before the company closed in 2013, became Orion’s prime supplier for creating engine and transmission cradles for transit buses.

Figure 3
The many monitors scattered on the Dellinger Enterprises shop floor give all employees access to the MRP system.

But these larger companies required Dellinger to work off blanket orders, something ProfitFab wasn’t equipped to handle at the time. Jason and Greg realized the business needed an MRP system that was more robust and customized to their needs.

“If you’re going to continue to scale the business, grow and be able to bring people in to do these jobs, you have to have a structured software environment that those people can come into and be able to plug into different areas of your company,” said Jason.

So, in 2003 Dellinger was put in contact with Steve Brantley, who founded a small tech startup from Charlotte called Ingenuity Software Corp. At the time Ingenuity’s MRP and ERP (enterprise resource planning) software was intended only for retail. But Brantley wanted his software to be multifunctional by expanding into the manufacturing sector. Dellinger became Ingenuity’s blueprint to create an MRP system specifically for a small to midsized fab shop.

Combined with Dellinger’s inclination for efficiency and lean manufacturing, as well as its experience using ProfitFab’s MRP system, the brothers knew what they wanted from the Ingenuity Software Suite.

“ProfitFab kind of taught us what to expect out of MRP software,” said Jason. “It gave us a vision for new software moving forward. We have a fab and job shop environment that has some unique challenges.”

Greg and the rest of the Dellinger management team, including Jason and Senior Engineer Chad Ballard, sat down with Brantley to develop an MRP system using best practices from Dellinger, Ingenuity, and ProfitFab.

“There was some back-and-forth and semi-arguments,” Jason said with a laugh. “A lot of processes built into the Ingenuity MRP software were originally not there to begin with.”

But, ultimately, Greg and Ingenuity successfully partnered to design a fully customized, end-to-end, and innovative MRP software platform. On top of creating a precise raw material ID scheme, the MRP software also allows Dellinger to do something most MRP/ERP systems don’t do: Take an outside service like powder coating or zinc plating and treat it as a manufacturing step added to the quote instead of a purchased component in the bill of materials.

“Since we outsource our finishing, we must send out POs,” Greg explained. “So, Ingenuity had to customize our software so that when we brought something back from being outsourced, it was like a transaction. When I was looking into other MRP systems, they didn’t have an outside finishing module. They usually try to combine that with purchasing. So, there wasn’t any software out there like this.”

And 15 years later, Dellinger still uses the almost exact same Ingenuity platform. “We haven’t had to make any major systemwide improvements to Ingenuity,” Jason said. “Most of what we’ve had to work on are just small bug fixes and features.”

Virtual Manager

Part of the reason Ingenuity has been so reliable and seamless for Dellinger the last decade and a half is Greg’s meticulousness, unwillingness to cut any corners, and insistence that Brantley’s MRP system was in it for the long haul.

“When we paid the money for software, we made sure we were going to get every single dime out of this software that we could get,” Greg said.

After all, the MRP system essentially became Dellinger’s shop foreman, purchasing manager, sales manager, production supervisor, shipping/receiving manager, quality assurance manager, schedule planner, and expediter all wrapped into one software program.

There are three key elements that Ingenuity delivers to meet Dellinger’s needs: visibility, flexibility, and accountability.

“First and foremost, it came down to visibility,” Jason said. “We have it all the way around.”

With monitors scattered all over the shop floor (Figure 2), every one of Dellinger’s 25 production and nonproduction employees have nearly full access to the software. That offers transparency and insight to every current and past project Dellinger has in its system.

Opposed to the other MRP and ERP systems that require different levels of permissions and time to access information to help a customer, Ingenuity allows any employee to have fully detailed information in real time within seconds. By simply punching in a part number, for example, employees can cross-reference any active/inactive PO; how many materials are included; who has worked or is currently working on a project; track any assembly notes with timestamps; and view any detailed instructions, diagrams, or videos.

Jobs for each workstation are also arranged in a color-coded method to organize work flow and scheduling. “This is how we’ve communicated with the guys on the floor for over 10 years,” Greg said. “We can even email through this.”

Colors indicate everything from a project’s priority to the status of an order. For example, anything in green is queued for work, anything in pink is ready to run on the laser, and anything in red means high priority.

“It’s a real intuitive thing for the guys to be able to see that schedule screen and understand what their work load is like at their machine level or department level at a quick glance,” Jason said. “It allows our guys to ask more informed questions.”

And the adaptive software allows for Dellinger to be flexible when customers work off various blanket orders, spot POs, and revision levels. It also helps the shop work together with Fortune 500 companies that might be operating with other MRP systems like Oracle NetSuite, MRPEasy, or Fishbowl Manufacturing.

The MRP system also keeps Dellinger employees accountable with its batch ordering/shipping screens and JTrac component, which is an issue-tracking web application that customizes work flow, field level permissions, file attachments, and email integration. When a work order is created, the system searches to see if the item is available and adds it to the PO if it’s not in stock. It also allows a quote out of the same screen to be added and emails it out.

But the most important feature of the software’s batch method is that it doesn’t allow an employee to continue with a purchase order if a material isn’t in the inventory. And that’s something that keeps Dellinger’s shop floor honest and responsible.

“Software now doesn’t really do that,” Jason said. “I guess companies are just trying to sell software that lets you to do pretty much whatever you want whether it’s right, wrong, or indifferent. There are folks that just want to make a packing list even if something isn’t in their inventory. But that’s going to create a lot of issues down the road. It’s kind of like when someone argues with the GPS when they don’t know where they are going.”

That’s what Dellinger cares about the most, doing the right and most efficient thing for their customers with team-oriented employees who are fully empowered to deliver on projects. And, at the end of the day, it’s their commitment to operating lean and a customized MRP system that allow Dellinger to have a profit margin that’s considerably larger than shops double their size and workers who have matched 401(k)s as well as fully covered family health insurance.

“Our customers couldn’t care less what I wore to work today, what my office looks like, or where I park my car,” Jason said. “They just want to make sure their parts are getting done, what [the parts] look like, and know how they are getting shipped. And that’s it.”

Dellinger is currently working on creating a web-based portal where customers can log in via the website to check the status of an order and track a shipment in real time or even cancel a PO before it heads to production. The company is also planning to integrate

Dellinger Enterprises Ltd, www.dellingerenterprises.com