Every welding shop is being forced by the economic times to do more than ever with fewer resources than ever. That makes a focus on productivity the name of the game.

“The typical company needs to do three things:

• Improve productivity.
• Become paperless.
• And, convert manual spreadsheets and data bases into one.”

Those are the words of Dusty Alexander, president of Global Shop Solutions, a company that develops enterprise resource planning (ERP) software systems.

Global Shop Solutions recently introduced a new product — its Global Application Builder (GAB) software — that is designed to increase productivity throughout an organization by allowing users to modify enterprise resource planning system to suit their specific needs.

Alexander said field-testing of his company's global application builder in several applications proved the system to be an asset to large and small manufacturing enterprises including welding and machine shops.

The application helped to improve productivity on the shop floor by as much as 25 percent, Alexander said.

He said that the product is unique for enterprise resource planning. The software is a rapid application development (RAD) language built from the front to integrate with his company's Global Shop Solutions One-System enterprise resource planning software.

Unlike other customization tools, Alexander said the global application builder allows front-end and business logic programs to be customized without impact to the core system.

That allows users to integrate the software used in their shops so that they can locate jobs immediately and identify where that job is in the production process. Alexander said that eliminates the need to find a paper trail to track jobs.

On the production floor, the system tells employees what job is next. In a job shop setting the software is designed to schedule jobs on machines that run multiple jobs each day. Job scheduling is done via a monitor located at the machine.

According to Alexander, enterprise resource planning system gives everyone in a shop longer vision on jobs that are working through the enterprise.

“What many companies are doing now is shuffling a lot of data bases, but don't know the real-time all the impact of all of this,” he said.

“They have a financial program such as Quickbooks or Peachtree; Exel or Access spread sheets with one sheet per job; and still more programs for purchasing, inventory and scheduling, but none are related and so they are not seeing the impact of the spreadsheet with all the other components of the enterprise. Enterprise resource planning provides that vision,” Alexander said.

Concise Industries, a precision metal fabricator, has multiple plants. The company headquarters are in Elk Grove Village, Ill., and it has facilities in Tucson, Ariz., and in Nogales, Mexico.

That company uses Global Shop Solutions to pull together is mix of product lines and to know what is going on at each of its facilities.

Brian Rieble, vice president of Concise Industries, said his company was looking for enterprise resource planning software that was flexible, robust, and affordable when it found the products Alexander's company makes.