Unique Tool and Manufacturing Company Inc. Case Study

About Unique Tool

A few years ago, the managers at Unique Tool and Manufacturing realized they had a problem on their hands. For years, the North Carolina-based job shop had run its business with a series of notebooks and spread- sheets. In fact, all of the business’s most important documents were spread through a series of filing cabinets and stored on various computers.

Why Unique Tool Chose E2

According to manager Bill Jones, the old way of doing business became a problem. “There really wasn’t much of a system,” he said. “We just kind of did things on the fly and saved stuff wherever it was most convenient. But it just became too complicated to work efficiently.”
That’s when Unique Tool decided that it was time for an ERP system. Bill said they looked at a number of different solutions, but ultimately decided on E2 because of its flexibility.

“We like that it’s broken up into modules, so you can only use the features you really want,” Bill said. “It seemed like with a lot of the others, that it was an all-or-nothing deal. You had to implement their whole system, even if you just wanted to use it for one or two things.”

According to Bill, E2’s Estimating and Scheduling tools are the most useful modules for E2. Before implementing E2, Unique Tool would come up with a custom estimate for every customer. That led to a lot of inconsistent pricing.

Now, they can quickly generate estimates that are consistent and based on the correct costs. He added that the scheduling module helps them push jobs through the shop faster than they ever did before. E2 also helped Unique Tool with its recent certification initiative. Unique Tool didn’t initially work with Shoptech as they were getting certified. They used another certification company to walk them through the process. However, Bill said that upon further review, he thinks E2’s quality module and documentation system would have helped them get certified in less time and at less expense.