American Heavy Plates, a steel plate rolling mill and plate processor located in Hannibal, Ohio, has implemented the cloud-based INVEX metal service center software from Invera, the metal enterprise software solution provider.
The INVEX metal software provides a comprehensive set of metal-specific features with a state-of-the-art cloud-based technology stack and an intuitive native web user interface.
Software Implementation
INVEX was able to meet all their metal specific business cases out of the box, allowing for a faster implementation. The implementation at AH Plates was performed with no INVEX software modifications required.
AH Plates implemented a full complement of INVEX features including inventory management, purchasing, sales, online production planning, plate cutting processing functions, shop-floor production recording, warehouse tablet functions, job scheduling, and online shipment planning. Using the personalization features available in INVEX, AH Plate also customized multiple business documents.
AH Plate Slab and Ingot Rolling Process
AH Plates produces their steel plate from steel slabs or ingots using a rolling process. These steel slabs can be from 9”-12” thick or steel ingots up to 24” thick. Once the plate has been produced at their facilities, AH Plates can perform a number of value-add processes such as testing, heat treating, machining, as well as oxy plate cutting and beveling.
Sales
From the INVEX Sales module, AH Plates benefits from the Order Status Desktop, which shows a comprehensive status of the customer order at a single glance. Since the plate rolling, heat treating, lab testing, and plate cutting processing steps are being recorded in the warehouse, the Sales Department can see the item’s status as it goes through each process — whether scheduled, in process or complete — all from desktop or mobile devices.
“Our business is unique from a typical plate service center since we produce our steel plate from slabs using a rolling process. We were pleased that we could implement the INVEX ERP with no modifications which helped reduce the risk and length of time to implement this metal industry enterprise software.”
–Damian Brennan, Vice President and Co-Founder
Production
For Production, INVEX enables AH Plates to reduce paper consumption through the use of INVEX on-line Production Planning. From the production planning screen, multiple order items can be highlighted and grouped together to create a single plate cutting job which is used to process the plate to a variety of shapes for the customer. Benefits included better material utilization, which increased profitability.
AH Plates also utilized INVEX multi-step processing features to track each step of the process at their facilities using the multi-plant process routing features. As the slabs are consumed, plates are produced and continue with their processing steps, value can be attributed to each step, which leads to the accurate tracking of net profitability for each order.
Plate Nesting
Using the API’s provided in INVEX, AH Plate integrated INVEX with the plate nesting software, SigmaNEST. The INVEX Certified Partner, iTECH GO provided the packaged integration with SigmaNEST. This eliminates the need to manually load inventory and new orders into SigmaNEST. In addition, once the nesting process is complete, the integration returns the resulting production job and inventory allocation, from SigmaNEST to INVEX.
About AH Plates
American Heavy Plates began production in 2020 in Hannibal, Ohio. They focus on just-in-time production of steel plates and parts. By keeping its inventory in semi-finished form, AH Plates can supply customer demand for any quantity of a particular grade and size so there are virtually no stockouts of any product.
Customers can buy several railcars at a time or a single pallet. This level of customer focus allows customers to avoid inventory-carrying risk, while guaranteeing their ability to source hard-to-find products on a just-in-time basis. With over 300,000 square feet of warehouse and production space in Hannibal, Ohio, AH Plates is centrally located and services customers throughout North America.
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