Philip Engineering is a Scottish engineering company supplying customers in demanding industry sectors such as the Oil & Gas industry.  The company is owned by Alan and Linda Philip and in 2013 they implemented the SMART resource management database tool to replace their paper-based job management system.  

The SMART database and training was delivered by our partner company Viable Ventures in August that year and the team at Philip Engineering have been using it ever since.   

SMART is used by the management team to record and track customer jobs from inception through to their effective and efficient completion, whilst also having simple and ‘easy-to-access’ reference to previous jobs to enable repeat/similar orders to be implemented efficiently.  Their SMART database records quotation, task description and materials used against each job, engineering drawings are attached to individual job records, and the team at Philip Engineering also use SMART to automatically generate important logistics documents such as delivery notes. 

In discussing his experience of implementing SMART, Alan admits he was sceptical at first and needed a few months before committing to switching fully to SMART from their original hard copy system, which he had been using for 20 years.  In the front office, their administrator Donna Fraser really inspired the rest of the team to embrace it: “I hadn’t been working here for long when SMART was introduced and I thought the change was just magic!”   

At Philip Engineering SMART is accessible through 4 PCs, including on the shop floor where it is used to double-check details in a job’s drawings and track the manufacturing progress of jobs.  Back in the front office Donna is the lead user of SMART and uses it to log incoming job requests before they are converted into quotes and then allocated as jobs to the shop floor – Donna also finds it invaluable for accessing customer contact details – all from the same tool. 

Alan and Donna both agree that the biggest benefit they have found from using SMART is the time saved, because of the speed and efficiency with which the whole team are able to access specific job information very rapidly.  If a repeat task came in from a customer before they had SMART, people depended on Alan remembering which ledger the previous task’s details were in, in order to review the original task when quoting for the new one.  Now SMART plays a pivotal role in this by saving the whole team a great deal of time in building quotes for their customers – all of which means that Alan has even more time to spend focusing on what Philip Engineering does best: delivering quality precision products to their clients. Not only that, should their customers carry out a supplier quality audit, Alan’s team can instantly extract the necessary information in just a few keystrokes. 

“Overall, I’m very happy with SMART”, says Alan, “it does exactly what we need it to, it’s very reliable and we can find and manage customer job details in no time at all”.  

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