Overview
Manufacturer Lamothermic Corp. has been managing its work on spreadsheets and paper for nearly 50 years. As its customer base grew, Lamothermic needed an online solution that reduced bottlenecks and improved lead time across its portfolio. In only six months, ProjectManager has improved productivity by 80 percent. It provides Lamothermic with an all-in-one software solution to plan timelines, allocate resources and streamline workflows. There are future plans to expand ProjectManager’s use as Lamothermic continues to find success using the software.
Key challenges
- Spreadsheets and paper documentation caused disorganization
- Lead time suffered due to buried and unreliable project data
ProjectManager’s solutions
- Gantt chart planning and baselines offer dependency management and tracking
- Resource management features help with strong returns on project investment
Standout features
- Gantt chart
- Dashboards
- Reports
- Workload chart
- Team page
Location
Brewster, NY
Website
lamothermic.com
Industry
Manufacturing
Size
>50 employees
Lamothermic Corp. is a manufacturer and supplier of precision investment castings. The company is growing, with a goal of achieving $1 million in revenue and expanding into new markets, such as aerospace to add to its customer base in automotive, firearms, medical and military.
Cesar Ferreras is the quality assurance manager. He manages a team that oversees inspection and started at the company about four years ago. “For years, the company has been managing on pen and paper or spreadsheets,” he said. “Everything was spread out on computer or paper files. I was looking for something to help me get organized.”
ProjectManager improved productivity by 80 percent
Ferreras looked at other project management software products, but they were too expensive, difficult to use and didn’t have the suite of features that ProjectManager offered. “At the end of 2023, I signed up with ProjectManager,” he said. “I started using it, shared it with the vice president of manufacturing who loves it.”
They use ProjectManager to oversee many projects in the company. “We use it to plan, get timelines, allocate resources for teams in engineering and quality assurance,” Ferreras said. “ProjectManager gives us everything we are looking for in a project management software,” he added. After only six months of using ProjectManager, Ferreras said his productivity has improved by 80 percent.
“ProjectManager gives us everything we are looking for in a project management software.”
Cesar Ferreras
Quality Assurance Manager at Lamothermic
Lamothermic leverages portfolio management features
Ferreras noted they use features ranging from reporting to resource management and dashboards. “The portfolio management features were also very attractive to us since I’m managing multiple projects,” he said.
Lamothermic uses ProjectManager for projects, not necessarily individual part products, such as getting ISO certification. “I’ve broken down our preparation for ISO into different projects and keep track of them in ProjectManager,” Ferreras said. “The fact that we can work on documents, collaborate and put them in ProjectManager so everything was accessible whenever someone wanted to see them.”
Planning projects and resources
Ferreras plans on Gantt charts, where he can link all four types of task dependencies, filter for the critical path and set a baseline to track planned effort against actual effort. “I like the Gantt charts a lot,” he adds. “It’s easy to use and I can make changes or corrections in the sheet view. When I go back to the Gantt chart the changes are there. I like that functionality.”
Once the project is planned on the Gantt, Ferreras will use the workload chart and the team page to ensure his team is properly allocated. “I can see who is available and make sure no one is overallocated or assignments are overlapping,” he said.
Working leanly, tracking costs and reducing waste
Ferreras uses timesheets to manage payroll, but also monitor labor costs. “I put the hourly wages into ProjectManager and can track costs to ensure we’re getting a return on our investment,” he said.
Lamothermic wanted to improve its lead time with Lockheed, one of its clients. “I used ProjectManager to track the whole process of this particular product line from cradle to grave,” Ferreras said. “Because we set a baseline in the Gantt chart, I was able to track time and cost to find the bottlenecks, show the engineers where the issues were and they were able to fix it.
Ease of use means future expansion
There are still so many features that ProjectManager has to offer that Ferreras. He wants to use more project views, such as task lists, kanban boards and the calendar, as well as automation tools to streamline workflows. Ferreras thinks there’s room to expand beyond the five people currently using the software because ProjectManager is easy to love.
“The tutorials and the knowledge base are so good that whenever I have a question about how to use the software I can easily find the answer,” Ferreras said.