48. Huge Parts, Huge Success: Craig Lange of Lange Machine & Tool

Some shops measure parts in millimeters. Lange Machine and Tool measures them in tons, up to 80,000 pounds, to be exact.

But running a shop that handles massive mining and foundry components with a small batch, high-mix workflow presents a unique data challenge. For decades, Craig Lange's family business relied on paper cost cards and a custom-built Access database to keep track of it all.

It worked, but at a cost. It required nearly a full-time employee just to handle data entry, and tribal knowledge was constantly slipping through the cracks. When a job came back three years later, the team often had to "relearn" the setup from scratch.

In this episode, Craig shares how moving to ProShop ERP was the administrative equivalent of upgrading from a manual lathe to a CNC machine.

By digitizing their entire workflow, Lange Machine cut office processing time from days to just five minutes. They captured critical setup data, reducing setup times by 10%. Most impressively, when a key administrative employee retired, the new efficiencies allowed them to handle a 15% increase in growth without backfilling the position.

This is a story about how a 52-year-old family business modernized their operations to handle monster parts with precision and profitability.

Craig Lange on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-lange-83974b1a/

Lange Machine and Tool: https://www.langemachine.com/

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