Whether transporting oil or natural gas, supporting construction projects, or running crucial electrical wiring, pipe and tube companies deliver essential products that keep the world running.
Pipe and tube companies create a significant impact, and that goes far beyond getting products out the door. Customer and industry requirements can demand a lot of these companies – especially if they don’t have the technology to back them up.
Pipe and tube company customers have unique needs and often expect a quick turnaround with their orders. In addition, the companies must meet specific quality requirements for the materials they produce. But delivering quality and accuracy is not easy if a company is working with inferior technology that slows everything down.
That’s why it's important for pipe and tube companies to have a solution to fit their specific needs and offer a single source of truth for capturing accurate information and delivering quality products on time. Additionally, it helps to work with a team that understands the importance of getting it right and can help with making critical decisions.
Here are four ways enterprise resource planning (ERP) software specific to metals industry needs can help pipe and tube companies:
Optimizing inventory and accurately billing customers can feel like putting together a complex puzzle – except profit is on the line. Companies need the ability to track tubes in pieces, log the actual weight of each item, and then bill customers accurately. Without innovative technology, accuracy could be in question, and valuable time might be wasted tracking inventory.
Technology specifically designed for metals businesses, including pipe and tube companies, can take complex processes and simplify them significantly. For example, with the ability to manage multiple units of measurement in inventory, a company can optimize inventory tracking, bill customers accurately, and maximize your profit margins.
Traditional ERP systems handle many offline calculations and analyses when working with one single coil to produce many slit coils to optimal widths. That’s fine for a team that enjoys frustrating manual calculations and has time and money to burn – but there aren’t many such teams.
With a metals-specific ERP system, coil slitting processes can be calculated and executed in one unified system. As a result, companies can maximize material use and automation, saving time and money while also removing the frustration of manual calculations. And because technology is doing the heavy lifting, team members can focus on high-value projects.
Heat traceability is needed upon coil receipt and continues through the slitting, tube welding, and secondary processes. Delivering this process is complex and accuracy is critical, but most outdated technologies (and even some modern ERP systems) can’t provide effective heat traceability.
Heat traceability certification is essential in the metals industry, and without it, companies might not be able to successfully serve their customers. Thankfully, an ERP solution exists that can help track heat properties throughout the entire production process, including generating a certificate of analysis for customers.
Offering quality and accuracy is crucial, and it’s important to monitor quality in real time. But tracking internal, industry, and customer-specific details in the production process is not always easy, especially with so many moving parts.
Metals-specific solutions are available to help track specifications like inside diameter, outside diameter, gauge, wall thickness, length, and maximum bundle weights throughout the production process – all in real time with accuracy. An ERP solution that offers this functionality, and a real-time dashboard, allows pipe and tube companies to deliver with confidence.
Crowe has built an end-to-end metals ERP solution, the Crowe Metals Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics 365™, that meets the unique requirements of pipe and tube companies and allows them to deliver accurate, quality products to customers on time.
Our decades of experience in the metals industry have enabled us to craft an ERP solution built specifically for metals companies. Schedule a demo today to see how our solution can work for your pipe and tube company.
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