Screwmatics of South Carolina Inc.

About Screwmatics

Screwmatics of South Carolina Inc. has been family owned since 1988. The Hogge family started it with just two machines, and it has grown to 130 people with well over 200 machines today. They’re a CNC Swiss and Screw Machine shop that does high-volume production machining. Their newest addition to the shop is the plating division. The main industries that they work with include medical, plumbing, power distribution and industrial equipment because they have medical ISO certification 13485 and specialize in lead-free brass. Billy Hogge is the Vice President and Operations Manager at Screwmatics, while his father still remains President and is the manufacturing manager. As well as his role as VP, Billy does sales and marketing.

When Hogge started working full time at Screwmatics in 2011, they were using JobBoss as their ERP system. After six months of attempting to integrate an updated JobBoss program into their shop, it wasn’t working out. Screwmatics was unable to see costs and profits because they couldn’t run any relevant reports in JobBoss. It was too hard for them to keep track of everything in that system, and when he called support he couldn’t get a reply for a week. When asked about his experience with Shoptech’s customer support Hogge said, “One of the main reasons I love E2 is being instantly connected with someone.”

After trying and failing to work with the JobBoss system, it was time to look for a new solution. Hogge found E2 through an ad on YouTube. He reached out to Shoptech for more information and they sent someone to the shop to do a demo of the software. E2 was the only product they needed to see before making the switch from JobBoss. It was an easy changeover in the shop, despite having a large quantity of handwritten information. According to Hogge, “The transition over to E2 has definitely been a game-changer for us.”

In 2012 Screwmatics started with E2 Pro, and later upgraded to the E2 Shop System. Initially, there was a bit of a learning curve and the implementation took time since they had to manually input all of their data from the previous system. A year after the initial implementation they had the full inventory running in E2. Billy recognizes that, “It’s a very intuitive software, and it’s just easy, it really wasn’t anything too difficult for us to adopt.” E2 made running their shop easier. There was no paper trail before and they did all quotes manually. Now, the system has transformed the way they present themselves as a company when sending formal quotes, order acknowledgements, shipment notifications, etc.

It used to take a long time to pull up an order because Screwmatics makes so many different parts with thousands of different part numbers. Today, the software automatically tells how many pieces are in stock, and helps manage the materials better than before. This is nice when Hogge is on the road, he can pull up E2 from wherever he is and look up parts or order details. It’s all right there in his hand. E2 shows what they’re doing and at what rate. All of those reports and the backlog are easily accessible. Many of the features in E2 were new for Screwmatics. Now they can better track their performance, employees’ performance, and their vendors’ performance. Basically, the biggest improvement was being able to track what they’re doing.

In the future Screwmatics wants to continue to work with E2 to keep customers happy, deliveries on-time, and quality maintained. The next project within E2 is to integrate their plate division with the software. They’ve had trouble in the past keeping track of the actual costs and sales of just the plating division. Eventually, all of that data will be tracked and stored in E2, and Screwmatics will have a complete picture of their shop.