20 August 2009

North American welding product supplier improved productivity by improving information flow.

Red-D-Arc Welderentals, an Airgas company, is the largest provider of welding and welding-related rental products and services in North America, with over 45,000 units in its fleet. Started in 1955, Red-D-Arc became an Airgas company in 1995 and currently offers rental welding-equipment through over 45 service centres throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico and Europe, as well as through Airgas Construction Stores, and a joint-venture operation in the United Arab Emirates.

Through its subsidiaries, Airgas is the largest US distributor of industrial, medical and speciality gases and related hard goods, such as welding supplies. Airgas is also the third-largest US distributor of safety products, the largest US producer of nitrous oxide and dry ice, the largest liquid carbon dioxide producer in the Southeast, and a leading distributor of process chemicals, refrigerants and ammonia products.

Red-D-Arc provides electric welders and engine-driven welders for a wide range of processes and applications, through its Rental and Welder-Logistics Lease programmes. The company also provides welding positioners to help manufacturers increase productivity by making welding processes faster and easier. Its factory-trained technicians take care of service and maintenance tasks for the machinery.

Red-D-Arc needed to make optimal use of its information, in order to better manage its businesses. It turned to Jet Reports to find the answer.

“Managers today understand that they should have information at their fingertips to help them better manage their businesses,” says Michelle Lewis-Waddell, controller of Red-D-Arc. “Jet Reports is providing us operational and corporate management visibility into our business like we have never had before.”

We like to be a lean, mean business and not be dependent on others to get the information and to facilitate reporting

Michelle Lewis-Waddell, Red-D-Arc Jet Reports is an analytical tool that links Microsoft Excel with a database, explains Lewis-Waddell. “In this case we use Microsoft Dynamics NAV,” she says. “We use Jet Reports to instantly extract that information out of NAV in a format that we want. Managers are provided with a means to see into their business through advanced reporting techniques, eliminating the need to involve programmers or IT groups.”

Lewis-Waddell continues: “Managing the fleet is key to Red-D-Arc as a rental welder company. Recently we were looking for some new sales statistics. This was not readily available in the past. It took considerable gyrations in the past to produce these numbers, and even so they weren’t the most accurate because of the copying and pasting that had to happen to collect the specific information we wanted. With Jet Reports we were able to get exactly the information we were looking for with the accuracy and speed we wanted.”

The solution enables the company to access information in different formats that are relevant to the way it needs to do business. “Red-D-Arc is provided with the best means to monitor our business operations in detail on a daily, weekly and monthly basis,” says Lewis-Waddell. “This enables Red-D-Arc to make strategic and operational decisions with accuracy.

“We like to be a lean, mean business and not be dependent on others to get the information and to facilitate reporting. We give the departments in our organisation the independence to do their jobs and produce reports on their own.”

Lewis-Waddell concludes: “Through Jet Reports, our reporting is now taking the mystery out of corporate and operations reporting for us.”

This article first appeared In the 2009/10 edition of the Prime Partner Guide

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