The Situation

Langford Metal have been a successful business for over 60 years and currently own 6 buildings spread over 10,000m2 in Brisbane and are one of Queensland’s largest fabricators of sheet metal products. In 1994 iTMS were approached by Langford Metal as it was clear that the business needed to implement systems in order to cope with the continued growth of the business. Langford Metal did not have any software in place at that point so the business was 100% manual and this was becoming very time consuming and repetitive which in turn was impacting on turn-around times, customers and the overall profitability of the business.

We were initially impressed with several factors that led us to further discussions including:

• Australian owned product that is also supported here
• User friendly interface and workflows
• Modular solution that allowed us to add features as we required them at any point
• All in 1 solution that provides us with a single point of truth for all our business data
• In depth understanding of the manufacturing industry

The Solution

Itms (Opto) installed the Manufacturing software over the period of a few months and during this period identified a wide variety of areas and processes that could be greatly improved upon thus saving both admin and production time. As the Opto solution Integrated in to Langfords accounting package it also reduced the duplication of data entry and the possibility of errors. Today Langford Metal is utilising most of the components within their Opto system including sales quoting and ordering, scheduling, job control, stock control, ordering, reporting and despatch.

The Outcome

The biggest win for the business has been the sheer amount of time that has been saved by having a system that provides ‘real time’ data at the touch of a button. If a customer calls asking where their job is up to or when it will be ready for delivery, the answer is always just a click away. Glen, the owner of Langfords also says that Opto are great to deal with a deep understanding of the industry and are ready to listen to new feature requests and many such requests discussed with Glen over the years have been incorporated into the system, which provides increased functionality, not only for Glen but for all customers.

Other aspects of Opto that the team at Langford Metal utilise every day include:

• Production scheduling, we have a scheduling manager who relies on Opto every day to plan and manage all our job scheduling, factory wide
• All data entered only once, we enter sales quotes and these turn into jobs and run right through the production cycle and out of despatch, all in Opto
• Simple, yet powerful parts and material ordering with minimum stock level alerts and lead times that help keep our job schedules on time, all the time
• Informative and flexible reporting, we rely on the reports for management meetings as we know the information is accurate and real time.

Customer Quote

‘In my option and being a satisfied customer for over 20 years, Opto is a must for any business that operates within the manufacturing environment. It is Australian owned and supported and I have only ever received the highest level of service and support when required. The team are pro-active and very easy to deal with and I would have no hesitation in recommending the product and company to other businesses, in fact, I have, several times over the years’.