HTS Coatings

About HTS Coatings

In 2015, when a local St. Louis business was closing their doors and liquidating after 60 years, Jason and Ashley Hunsaker decided to take the big plunge into the metal coating business. It was time to take everything that was great at the old company and make it even better. They purchased some of the closing company’s equipment, moved to a new building and opened the doors to HTS Coatings, Inc. in just a few short months.

While the first few years of a new business is always tough, Ashley, the CFO of HTS Coatings, Inc., knew the first hurdle was to find the right shop planning and management software. She and her husband tested a few platforms but loved the way E2 worked right out of the box. “We didn’t want to spend a lot of time with customization,” said Ashley. “We needed affordable shop software that worked, had a user-friendly interface and could be up and running right after purchase.”

Ashley and her husband weren’t shy about learning the software themselves and said Shoptech’s E2 training videos were all they needed in order to get started. “We had just had a baby and while we took turns feeding our little one, we were learning the software at those 2 am wake-ups!”
In the fall of 2017, Ashley’s shop was struggling with productivity. “Our business was surviving but we weren’t growing like we knew we could,” recalled Ashley.

Their solution was to implement an employee incentive program they titled “The Gain Share Program.” Using E2’s reporting modules, they devised a program which tracked and detailed the time and accuracy for each employee and job. At the end of the month, they evaluated and calculated how much was saved or lost in terms of hours for each employee. If an employee saved the company money based on performing a task in fewer hours than expected, they would receive a grade level and a bonus based on that grade level. “Reducing non-pro time was a key factor in taking our business from surviving to thriving,” said Ashley.

In fact, along with adding more equipment and employees, The Gain Share Program has helped Ashley’s business increase their revenue by 57% in just under 6 months. “I knew the program had the potential to make big changes in our business but we are blown away at how much we’ve improved productivity.”
With business growth, Ashley is planning to add more technology to the floor by way of iPads and TV screens that show the job flow and schedule. With these changes, Ashley’s team will know what’s up next and will be able to anticipate issues before they even happen. Ashley said that she and Jason have always dreamed they could be big, but just didn’t realize how quickly that growth would come. “We owe so much of that to the E2 software,” commented Ashley.

HTS Coatings is now looking to concentrate on improving their customer care score. “With our client’s projects, it takes a long time to get things through the shop,” admitted Ashley. “We recently switched to the E2 cloud service so we could focus on improving on-time delivery and client communications. “Because of the specific information from the E2 reports, our customer score is improving and we’re seeing results that allow us to better understand what we need to work on next.”