In the hydraulics industry, pressure is everything. It’s the driving force for creating physical change - pushing, pulling, digging, and lifting. By controlling the pressure of fluids or gases, hydraulic equipment can move and lift heavy loads with ease.
Precision Hydraulics, a Koble client in Salisbury PA, is an expert in this field. Since 2019 they have experienced 30-40% growth each year, the kind of growth that puts a lot of pressure on the operations of a company, especially one with a small team. During this time of intense and rapid growth, Tony and his team at Precision Hydraulics found that keeping up with routine tasks was getting harder and harder to manage using QuickBooks.
Inventory management, in particular, was extremely difficult and time-consuming. With QuickBooks, they had to complete all their inventory checks manually. But with increased demand for their services, they had no time to check their stock levels during the day. Tony and his team would typically have to stay late into the evening at the shop in order to ensure they had what they needed for the next day’s customers.
Even with dedicated employees willing to put in the work, this manual process left plenty of opportunity for human error, and overall was unreliable. Purchasing became one big guessing game; and guessing wrong was costly.
Enter ERP
After learning about Koble from another hydraulics company, Tony began to consider how the right ERP system might help him solve the inefficiency challenges he was facing in the day-to-day routine by connecting his processes.
“Anything you can do to simplify and make things more efficient makes the overall workload easier for everyone. That’s the beautiful thing about Koble’s platform – it’s a way that we can streamline work across multiple levels with many different people involved.”
-Tony Beachy, Precision Hydraulics General Manager
Navigating the change of a new system
Although Tony didn’t know exactly what to expect, he knew that implementing ERP and the change in processes was going to be a big lift. After all, according to Gartner, between 55% and 75% of ERP implementations fail to hit their objectives, going over-time and over-budget (or are cancelled altogether). It was crucial to Tony that their ERP investment would be successful, which is one of the big reasons they decided to partner with Koble.
Together Tony and the Koble team were able to build a plan that would ensure a successful transition, taking in to account the timing of the implementation, how to go about training, and setting up the system to support Precision Hydraulic’s specific processes.
“The overall implementation was absolutely stellar. The team at Koble is fantastic – a great group of people that are very easy to work with and very willing to take time and answer questions. I would highly recommend the Koble team to anyone.”
Tony ran point for Precision Hydraulics throughout the implementation. He went through all the trainings with the Koble team throughout the implementation process, and then brought back what he learned to the rest of his team. They’d practice what they were learning in their data sandbox until they understood it well and could use it in everyday operations.
They’ve been live in the system for a little over a year, and since then training new hires in the system has been relatively easy, since they didn’t have to “unlearn” the old way of doing things.
Since going live, their inventory management has been completely revolutionized. There are counts of everything they have in the system, set up with min and max counts and reorder points. Now when Tony needs to put a purchase order together, he just opens EBMS and runs down the list of needed stock. No more late evenings running manual counts.
Continuing to grow, empowered by an ERP
So, what’s next on the horizon for Precision Hydraulics? There’s a possibility of opening another location, as well as increased road service. They’re excited about some of the tools that Koble offers that will allow them to track time and materials, create sales orders, and attach components to a purchase order while out on the road.
“We haven’t even scratched the surface of potential of what this business can be, which is why we’re excited to move forward with Koble. It’s open as far as we want to go – there’s nothing in the system that is holding us back from expanding. It’s designed to allow us freedom and growth.”
To learn more about Precision Hydraulics, LLC, you can give them a call at (814) 662-2266 or stop in at their Salisbury PA location.
