Capital Equipment Software Helps Business Grow
Nol-Tec Systems, Inc. in Lino Lakes, Minnesota, knew they needed both a powerful ERP system and a job costing system and they knew which one – JOBSCOPE.
“We needed a job cost reporting system, and we needed to automate to tie in our separate inventory and accounting systems that were being manually maintained,” said Lynn Joachim, Accounting Manager at the company that designs and manufactures pneumatic conveying equipment. “We have people working here, including myself, who had experience using Jobscope at another business. We were already familiar with Jobscope’s job costing system and knew that it could meet our needs”
Nol-Tec has been pleased with the results. “We like this system’s flexibility,” Joachim said. “We can choose which features we will use and how we will use them. We can choose the depth of detail we want to collect on any job.”
Flexibility is also what allowed Nol-Tec to link its own sales quotation system to the parts database in Jobscope. “We can pull in the description, cost and selling price of parts and assemblies,” Joachim said, “which in turn allows the sales and engineering departments to communicate better with one another about what has been included on a customer’s system.”
Jobscope’s Order Analysis can provide any kind of data needed about a project. “We use Order Analysis for all sorts of research – billing, shipping, material cost, purchase order status, labor hours,” Joachim said. “We have defined categories to help us better analyze costs on projects and to separate labor for different billing classifications such as on-site labor versus in-house labor.”
“Order Analysis pulls the whole job activity together for us,” she said. “And since it is view only, we can safely allow access to this information without altering our level of data security.”
Jobscope also allows a company to set up contracts, jobs, releases, and work orders to keep track of specific steps in the manufacturing process. At Nol-Tec, a contract is set up summarizing the entire order. Nol-Tec uses the contract for the sales acknowledgement, invoicing and labor collection activities. “We then set up jobs to itemize the equipment order and place the job into production,” Joachim said. “We can have multiple jobs all linked to the same contract number. This allows us to look at costs at a variety of levels. We generally take a broad overview of our costs by collecting labor at the contract level, but if the need arises, we can collect labor at the job or work order level. It can change with each order.”
Having Accounts Payable linked directly to receipts speeds up the payment process and cuts down on possible payment errors by ensuring that vendors are paid the agreed upon price. “Accounts payable is linked to the purchase order receiving file,” Joachim said. “If the price in our system equals the price on the invoice, we approve payment. If there is a discrepancy between the purchase order and the actual invoice, then further authorization is necessary. We have gone from having every invoice manually approved by the buyer to having to deal with just the few exceptions.”
Nol-Tec also uses Jobscope to generate and track its customer invoicing; to review job costs during the project to resolve potential budget overruns; and to review job costs after job completion to examine the company’s own internal processes to ensure better efficiencies.
Nol-Tec has kept all the history of its jobs online since it began using Jobscope, and plans to maintain all of its data. “Disk space is cheap,” Joachim said. “History is invaluable.”
Jobscope is a comprehensive job costing and material requirements planning system designed primarily for companies that manufacture one-of-a-kind capital equipment and provide related maintenance and service.
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