Shop upgrades accounting software

Published in Manufacturing Engineering, August 2001

HUDSON, Ohio - A forty year old, high production screw machine shop in Valencia, California manufactures inserts for injection and rotational molding, fasteners for the plastic injection and sheet metal industry, some proprietary, customer products, as well as a small amount of sheet metal products.

Family owned since late 1980, when Bob Schreiner bought out a partner of 10 years, the company today has about 25 employees and operates out of several facilities. The Valencia shop has 12-15 Davenport and Brown & Sharpe screw machines. CNC equipment can be found at other VMP locations.

"For the past 15 years we were using a comprehensive DOS-based software accounting package for our inventory, purchase orders, and related work," says company CFO Sue St. George, and Bob Schreiner's daughter. "We didn't use it to it's full capacity, though we did use it for inventory, order entry, and accounting." In spite of being quite familiar with the software after working with it such a long time, the need to capture more specific job information finally prompted the company to take a look at today's manufacturing and accounting software.

The order entry and inventory modules of the mid-eighties manufacturing software have evolved into sophisticated shop management systems in their own right, so there was a wide choice of systems to research. "With the intent of finding something a little more job specific," St. George relates, "we attended several trade shows. I believe it was at Westec that we saw Visual EstiTrack for the first time.

"We looked into several software packages. Then, Jeff Carley, our senior operations manager, did a bit more research and determined that Visual EstiTrack would do the best job for us in fine tuning both our shop and the office operations - integrating the whole package together," St. George says. After an interesting on-line, Internet demonstration "we decided to give it a shot."

It was mid 2000 when VMP purchased EstiTrack and its integrated Visual Books accounting package, giving the company both shop management and accounting capability. "We bought the package with the goal of implementing it on January 1, 2001. Though we had a couple of months to learn it, we didn't get much hands on experience, because we were still working in our old package."

In October, Rich Henning visited the plant and trained several VMP employees, including St. George. "During the week he was here, he showed us how to quote jobs and turn them into orders, and also spent time with me on Visual Books. Then, in January, we just rolled over and started."

Learning it 'on the job,' as it were, St. George ran into a lot of questions. "There haven't been any problems with the software, however. In fact, it has lots of nice features that I didn't have before. First of all," she explains, "EstiTrack and Visual Books are fully integrated, Windows programs - once jobs , they appear in the accounting program - everything comes over from the manufacturing side." St. George likes the tracking features for aging sales and receipts. Though while she was still learning the program, she had some challenges, such as with the bank reconciliation feature. "But that may have been me, learning something new - I used the other system for 15 years.

"The first month I used the program, I made mistakes, not really doing things correctly. A few months later, I spent time going back, discovering my mistakes, and fixing them. That capability to backtrack and fix problems is nice. I wasn't able to do that before." In the Fall of 2001, St. George also met with other Visual Books users at an annual user conference where other users answered a lot of her day to day questions. She also found the responsiveness of the vendor's help desk personnel refreshing. "Telephone support for the software has been phenomenal; if I have a question, instead of calling, I might have racked my brain for two days. When I finally called I found it to be is so easy. The woman I usually work with, Liz, has been fabulous - she will figure it out, or recreate what I'd done. They get back to me right away to me."

"The EstiTrack screens are good. The Navigator feature is all you need, once you understand how Visual Books works." The Navigator screen displays a program flow chart. "I go to the navigator screen and work through that. I don't use the actual menu bar at the top, since the flow (of the Navigator) works so well. It lets you switch between functions easily, between accounts payable, receivable, or general ledger."

"Payroll is a phenomenal program." VMP's own payroll had been done on the DOS system. "The payroll is very nice, very user friendly. My brother, Steve Schreiner, does our payroll, and in the beginning couldn't believe how easy it was."

According to St. George, Henning is receptive to any suggestions. "I constantly tell them what I would like, that would make the program better for us. Though it is a good program as it is, everything can use improvement. The programming staff at Henning is always quite receptive - they want customers to let them know when there is something we feel can improve our operation.

For information: Henning Industrial Software, 581 Boston Mills Road Suite 300, Hudson, Ohio 44236; Telephone: (330) 650-4212; FAX: (330) 528-0397; Web: www.henningsoftware.com.

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