www.liversbronze.com
Kansas City
The Livers Bronze Co. started in 1946, and is celebrating its 70th year in business. Specializing in the design and manufacturing of custom railings and architectural metal fabrication using a variety of metals, they run a state-of-the art manufacturing facility and have decades of knowledge and expertise that makes them a recognized leader in their industry.
Over the years, the company has continuously strived to enhance and improve its operations to provide top quality products at competitive prices. Their industry is very competitive and ownership noticed they weren’t staying as efficient as they could, costing them opportunities and impacting sales overall. They found their systems served them well for the larger “home run” type of projects, but they were struggling to be competitive on those smaller jobs, the “singles” that keep the floor up and running and add significantly to company revenue.
Owner Deuce Livers contacted Missouri Enterprise for help. “The project managers at Missouri Enterprise conducted a Job Costing Analysis to help us identify and manage our Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). They helped us refresh our thinking so we could look differently at our operations and analyze things with a clearer perspective. It was a little bit like going back to school,” says Livers, “with a very good teacher!”
The company had been keeping a lot of finished product in-house waiting for delivery; their production was sometimes out of sync with constantly changing customer needs on delivery dates. “Missouri Enterprise helped us hone our listening skills and ask better questions so we could prioritize better,” Livers explains. “The project helped us better understand our overhead structure and how it was applied to production. After we reviewed and assessed with the Missouri Enterprise team, we were able to go back to our ERP provider, and $1000 later, they’d done some rewriting to our format so we could track jobs far more efficiently.”
“We’ve brought in lots of experts for help over the years,” Livers concludes, “but the people at Missouri Enterprise were the only ones who came in with such a strong manufacturing background. They know what they’re talking about, they understand the day to day realities of processes in a manufacturing facility; they speak our language!”
After working with Missouri Enterprise on their production issues, Livers Bronze is now much better positioned to “hit more singles instead of only shooting for those home runs,” says Livers. “We’re doing a much better job keeping our people and equipment busy, and we’ve found ways to enhance productivity and increase our bottom line profitability.”