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Technical Metals – Another Irish Manufacturer reaps the benefits of ProgressPlus

Technical Metals offer a wide range of CNC machining, anodising and surface preparation processes to a customer base in Ireland, UK and throughout Europe. Their clients operate in a wide range of industries including Aerospace, Defence, Telecommunications and Pharmaceutical.

As with a lot of manufacturing businesses, Technical Metals initially used tools such as Excel to manage their production and stock control. Ursula McGeown of Technical Metals said:

“As the business grew, we found it hard to manage our business processes on spreadsheets. We needed to find a solution to make our business more streamlined and give us more control over stock.”

More importantly for Technical Metals the company were squandering money because they didn’t have the right system in place. Ursula said:

“A lack of a production plan and overall visibility led to money being wasted. For instance, we were regularly ordering stock that we didn’t need. This gave us no other choice but to find a suitable business system.”

In their first search they bought a system from a local supplier in Belfast. However, this didn’t deliver the anticipated benefits. Ursula said:

“The first system we used didn’t work for us. It turned out to be not much more than a fancy Excel sheet without any level of drill-down. You couldn’t get any effective production reports and investment didn’t move our business forward.”

Berkeley Myles Solutions, Sales Manager, Stevie O’Reilly gave Technical Metals employees a demo of ProgressPlus. Ursula commented on the demo and selection procedure:

“Because of our experiences with the previous software, we were better placed to assess our options for a replacement and the production team knew exactly what they needed out of a system.

We put the vendors through our extensive selection procedure and after final demos of ProgressPlus and 123insight, it was clear that ProgressPlus would be the best choice.”

Technical Metals has only been using the system for a couple of months, but they are already getting benefit: Ursula commented:

“ProgressPlus is brilliant and I recommend it to everyone. All our employees say it is so easy to use. Entering new orders is straightforward and you can see exactly where any order is during production all the way through to completion.

  • We love the stock control – we can see active stock and order status
  • We love the reports
  • We love the quality management and on-time deliveries
  • We love the invoicing

The team at Berkeley Myles Solutions are fantastic. All of them have been really helpful and I couldn’t pinpoint one individual because they have all been brilliant.

The only thing I would say is the system is maybe even too cheap! The previous system was double the price but it didn’t offer a fraction of what ProgressPlus can do.”

Managing director Tony MacBride said he was delighted to further expand the company’s presence and commitment in Ireland.

He added: “We decided to setup a dedicated field-based resource to cover Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland so we can shorten implementation times and customers can go live quicker. It is great to see this investment help continue our expansion into Ireland.”

“We are pleased to be teaming up with Technical Metals to further develop our links throughout Ireland and look forward to a thriving future in the UK and beyond.”