Wellman Furnaces and Wellman Robey are both part of the Wellman International Group of Companies and both use the Jobscope ERP supplied by In2grate Business Solutions.

Wellman Furnaces design and supply specialised furnaces, new furnaces, furnace re-engineering, spares and automated furnace systems and has gained a reputation as a builder of custom-designed plant. This ability is based on the expertise gained from its wide range of reference installations in many industries and the diverse furnace companies that now constitute Wellman Furnaces.

Wellman Robey is a supplier of steam and hot water boilers including waste heat and combined heat and power schemes. Comprehensive after care service is provided via a team of in-house service engineers; large spares catalogue and extensive hire boiler fleet.

Commitment to research and development has resulted in the company leading the marketplace in the production of ultra low NOx environmentally friendly products.

“The system is so much part of our business we could not run without it. It gives us a degree of visibility that was impossible before.”

Anne-Marie Baillie, Group IT Manager

Wellman International proves that it is possible to have it all – clear cost visibility and control across the enterprise, plus a system that suits its individual companies’ production methods.-engineering with the inclusion of a logistics and accounting system.

Wellman manufactures boilers, pressure vessels and a range of industrial furnaces and heat exchangers. Products are made to order and configured to customer specification. They also make fast steam raising boilers for naval vessels and heat exchangers for Texaco, Shell and BP.

At any one time the company is handling over 40 contracts, involving over 100 shop floor operations. Increasingly, Wellman is involved in repair and refurbishment. Complexity varies considerably, some jobs taking 50 hours others 3,000 hours.

It is all too easy to make a product without making a profit. From the earliest estimates right the way through to commissioning the Company needs to be able to allocate resources and identify costs for each element of a project.

The trend to fixed cost and delivery date contracts has resulted in the need for real time reporting. Since late delivery often incurs penalty costs, companies need to monitor actual progress against plan on a project-by-project basis. Individual project visibility is, however, only part of the answer.

Remedial action may get one project out of trouble but can result in a serious adverse impact upon other projects. Management need to be able to track individual projects but at the same time have a clear picture of the total shop floor loading to avoid bottlenecks and creating other delays and costs.

One of the biggest difficulties manufacturing companies face today is to have planning and control processes capable of satisfying both board level and shop floor requirements. This becomes particularly acute in the make to contract and maintenance and repair operations where tight cost control over multiple projects does not always go hand in hand with the pressure to get a specific job completed and shipped on time.

Against this background Wellman decided to implement In2grate Business Solutions’ Jobscope ERP - part of In2grate’s Enterprise Solution. Jobscope is used in its entirety throughout the company, for estimating, creating jobs and works orders, stock and inventory control, despatch and all financial accounting.

Jobscope provides Wellman with the ability to measure jobs against original estimates, to monitor performance against forecasted profits and analyse projects to produce accurate quotes for similar work in the future. Wellman now has shop-floor data collection providing real-time analysis of costs and instant visibility of hours booked to any job.

“This is especially useful in knowing where we are in relation to the actual job cost and profit margin so we can identify problems early,” says Group IT Manager Anne-Marie Baillie. “Before, the information could be a month old so the job might be shipped before the actual costs were known.”

Another failsafe are alarms within the EIS (Executive Information System), programmed for instance, to trigger if costs exceed budget or stock levels hit pre-set levels with the system raising a requisition automatically - a degree of visibility impossible with manual checks.

Wellman is clear on its business needs – an information system that gives full control of capital goods contracts, not only recording actual costs but also a tool to forecast the outcome of individual projects.