Brisco Inc

About Brisco Inc

In 1966 a group of manufacturers and engineers started a small machine shop called Brisco Inc. They purchased the land their building currently sits on in 1969 and since then the company has been passed down as each of the founders retired. Today they are a machine, fab, and laser shop and have about 35 employees. A majority of their employees have worked there for 40 years and are treated as part of the family.

Brisco does a lot of prototype work and most of their production is low quantity, around two or three thousand units per job. Of their 300 customers, they work with a lot of local artists, NASCAR race teams, and some nearby, large companies such as Volvo and Caterpillar. Almost all of the orders they receive are specialized to that customer.

Before E2, Brisco was using JobBoss software in their shop. They struggled the most with inventory because they weren’t able to accurately track materials and waste from jobs, but have had much more luck in E2. Another feature that made JobBoss difficult to use was the short character codes for customer names. Every time someone needed to find a customer in the system, it was a guessing game unless they had every name memorized. Now, they can easily find customers with access to more characters and clear vendor codes.

They were using JobBoss until the entire system crashed and they lost six months of data, including the backups. After the crash, Brisco was looking to upgrade and redo their JobBoss system, but the extreme cost made them reconsider and look for another software vendor. They chose E2 because it was overall easier than JobBoss and working in it was much less challenging.

Brisco brought Heidi Lanter onboard to help with the transition in 2015. She spent the first six months there trying to recover data and enter it into E2. Since JobBoss crashed, there was nothing, no charts or print-outs, and they were starting from scratch. Heidi and a couple others came to Cincinnati for Shoptech’s classroom training to help them get started. She said it was “pretty self-explanatory” and took about six months with a significant portion of that time spent entering data. It’s been about four years since Heidi started at Brisco and now she is the office manager and works closely with their outside accountants. When recalling her time working with the implementation team and support at Shoptech, she said, “I do feel comfortable calling them because they really help and they have saved me so much time.”

Nowadays Brisco uses E2 for almost everything in their shop except for payroll. All of the purchasing, order entry, shipping, packaging, and accounting is done up front. Heidi uses E2 frequently to look up order history for the NACAR race teams they work with. This information is helpful for repeat customers and looking at what they were charged in the past and the quantity they ordered. “It really does streamline everything,” according to Heidi. Previously, it was hard to stay on top of those things with JobBoss, and that affected their cash flow quite a bit. Brisco’s billing process has drastically improved with E2. They know when jobs are being shipped and can bill customers right away, keeping the books balanced.

Looking ahead, Brisco would like to use E2 as a more comprehensive solution to become more profitable. Heidi already uses E2 to run reports and see where they could be making more money. Right now only a couple of shop floor employees use E2. One employee does a lot of quoting in E2 and it sends a materials requirement list to their purchasing agent for that job. This helps him get his materials faster and his jobs are completed sooner. They are also getting better at entering all the necessary data and filling out their forms. By entering all the data, E2 Shop System can do its job and ultimately help Brisco to sustain the shop longer and become more lucrative.