Gosiger Automation

Gosiger Automation, a robotics division that designs and implements robotic automation systems to meet the ever-increasing customer demand for higher productivity, needed a field service software solution to coordinate scheduling, time management, and to track labor costs more effectively. BlueFolder delivered.

Industry

Industrial / Manufacturing

Company Size

420 Employees

Solutions Needed

Field service management to communicate with multisite employees.

Goals

Simplify labor cost tracking and contract management.

With BlueFolder

Improved collaboration and resource sharing has bolstered Gosiger’s reputation for quality and service.

Company Overview

Gosiger, Inc. began as a Dayton, Ohio machine tool distributorship in 1922. True to the region’s pedigree as a birthplace of industrial innovation, Gosiger grew to become one of the largest family-owned machine tool distributorships in the country, employing nearly 300 people at nine facilities in eleven states.

As a true solutions provider, Gosiger focuses on helping clients improve their manufacturing processes to achieve a competitive advantage. Over the past twenty years a “company within a company” called Gosiger Automation evolved. Gosiger Automation is a robotics division that designs and implements robotic automation systems to meet the ever-increasing customer demand for higher productivity.

Gosiger Automation focuses on building its reputation for clean, hi-quality, professional installations. Their installation teams’ goal is to complete client-site installations within a week, with minimal interruption to the customer, leaving behind systems that require minimal follow-up service.

The Challenge

In the automation systems integration business professional installations result from the coordination of many human resources required to complete the design, construction, programming and testing of systems in-house prior to the actual field installation. Success is planned.

With any number of different customer programs in various phases of production ongoing at a particular point in time it is no surprise that scheduling, time management and tracking issues were slowing down the Gosiger Automation Team. They had no real- time insight into project costs, no truly practical master scheduling tool and no systematic method to communicate, pass and track job task assignments.

Critical information that would help management track costs and employees track each other was dispersed and disassociated. Multiple different schedules, files, etc. were time consuming to maintain and difficult to correlate. The situation became an impediment to managing complex jobs with intensive activities ranging from engineering and design to system assembly, installation and training.

The organization was overly dependent on “tribal knowledge”. Historical information that was documented wasn’t assessable to team members because they simply did not know where to look for it. Managers had no easy way to see labor costs in real time or by activity. A salesperson working with a potential new client had difficulty assessing independently when a new job could be scheduled. Do we have history with a potential client? Is a client’s system still under warranty? And, the lack of insight into actual labor costs and project expenses also affected the accuracy of future bids. The lag times built into the reporting system was hampering action that needed to be driven by real-time insight.

“Just four months after installation, we’ve already seen the impact on day-to-day business. BlueFolder has helped us better manage our company.” 

Mark Eddy, Gosiger Automation Division President

The Solution

Gosiger Automation’s Controls Engineering Manager championed the implementation of BlueFolder’s web-based field service management solution for its 17-person staff. Everything was loaded onto the system: all tasks (home and in the field), hour logs (labor records), expenses and even customer history going back to the 1990s — including the serial numbers, specs and staff related to all robots and machinery.

The Results

Now anybody on the team can log into project records, cutting down the time that Gosiger Automation staff have to spend seeking documentation and answers from other team members. Designers can more easily identify similar past jobs and anyone can see a client’s robot install base and support history. Shared information means that salespeople can make more accurate bids. Project managers have a dashboard to see the progress of all work and where job costs are accruing. The BlueFolder Field Service Management solution has simplified communication and created a framework for better organization for the Gosiger Automation team.

“Before BlueFolder, it was fairly easy to lose track of jobs and hours on service calls,” said Mark Eddy, division president. “Just four months after installation, we’ve already seen the impact on day- to-day business. BlueFolder has helped us better manage our company. Any edge we can find to better serve our customers helps us extend our company’s reputation for quality and our division’s reputation for service.”

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