- Client
- Lilleker Engineering
- Sector
- Engineering and fabrication (Rotherham)
- Outcome
- Off a legacy system and onto one shaped by the people using it
- What we do
- A replacement job costing system covering enquiries, purchase orders, materials, invoicing, documents and reporting, with ongoing support
The situation
Lilleker is a specialist engineering and fabrication business in Rotherham. Its job costing ran on an older system that was slowing down everyday work. Information took longer to find than it should, and nothing stopped someone changing a job that had already been completed.
Why replace it
Most of the time we’d recommend keeping a system and adding to it. Here, Lilleker needed jobs, materials, purchase orders, enquiries, invoicing and reporting brought into one platform. That platform had to be set up around how Lilleker works, not around how a generic package assumes an engineering firm works. The old system couldn’t carry that, so replacement was the honest answer.
What we built
Enquiry to invoice in one place. Enquiry tracking, purchase orders and materials sit in the same system as job costing, so a job can be followed from first contact to invoice without rekeying.
Search that finds things. Better customer, address and enquiry search. It sounds minor until you count how often someone looks up a customer in a day.
Completed jobs protected. Finished jobs can’t be changed by accident. A small change that removes a whole category of error, and one that’s hard to spot after the fact.
Documents and email. Paperwork leaves the business looking right without anyone tidying it first.
Dashboards and reporting. The information people ask for most is on a dashboard, not in a report someone has to run.
Automatic updates. Fixes and improvements reach every user without anyone installing them by hand.
How it was rolled out
We built, tested and deployed it alongside Lilleker’s own staff, with regular reviews as testing went on.
That shaped the result more than the original specification did. Once users had the system in front of them, they spotted things. Material management could work better, address search needed tightening, and enquiry tracking needed to do more. Those weren’t parked for a second phase. They were built and released while the project was still running.
Rollout included installation help, guidance for staff and remote support, with support and maintenance continuing after go-live.
What changed
Lilleker has moved off its old processes onto a system it can rely on, and one it helped shape. Jobs are under control, and enquiries, orders and materials can be found when they’re needed. The controls on completed jobs have removed a set of errors that used to have to be found and unpicked.
Because it was built for Lilleker, it can keep changing as the business does.
Get in touch
Is your system getting in the way?
Tell us what it does now and where it slows people down. We’ll come back with whether it’s worth keeping, what replacing it would involve, and what either would cost.
