There are very few Engineering companies today that can boast a heritage as rich as Bacon Engineering. Next year they celebrate 125 years in business with a 5th-generation Bacon family member at the helm David Bacon along with operations director Darren Glew. Their story is one of twists and turns, evolving from a trawler operator in the heyday of the Grimsby fishing industry, into the modern and progressive engineering company that today has established itself as a trusted partner across an array of sectors, including chemical, construction, food, marine, and energy/ renewables to name just a few.
In the past 7-8 years, the business has been through a significant period of modernisation, moving to new larger premises on the Humberside Industrial Estate and replacing most of its old machinery with state-of-the-art CNC equipment, growing a highly capable Fabrication team with a range of codings, whilst diversifying into drone and laser scanning technology. In June 2023, Bacon Engineering implemented MIE Trak Pro ERP software believing this would take the company to the ‘next level and beyond’, leaving behind the final administrative remnants of their ‘old-fashioned family-run business’ structure.
After identifying the need for ERP software in today’s competitive manufacturing industry, Bacon Engineering began a period of market research, searching both online and speaking with industry peers to produce a shortlist of 4 ERP providers. All were then demoed and tested against their specific requirements and MIE Trak Pro was selected as being the most comprehensive. ‘The deciding factor for us was a trusted partner of ours are already MIE Trak users, and so we were able to really pick their brains on the system and their experiences giving us confidence that MIE Trak Pro claims met its abilities’, comments managing director David Bacon.
After selecting MIE Trak Pro as their ERP provider, Bacon Engineering next looked to the implementation process. David explains how they approached this next stage ‘The biggest challenge we faced was to create the headspace within the business to learn and understand the system. This is difficult within a small business when resources are lean but ultimately we had to remember that MIETrak was acquired to improve our efficiencies and processes, so we began appointing super users and focused on rolling the system out 1 team at a time. The expertise of the MIE Solutions team has played a crucial role in our success. We have felt supported every step of the way and I recommend the team for their responsiveness to our needs’.
MIE Trak Pro is a complete modular software package designed specifically for the sheet metal and engineering industry, managing everything from initial customer inquiry through to invoice and shipping and everything in between. The biggest advantage for Bacon Engineering since installation is the software’s advanced analytics and data collection abilities. ‘This is a massive step forward for us, as it now allows us to make evidence-based decisions across a far broader range of business functions that we couldn’t have done previously. We now have a single system across the entire business containing our quoting and performance data which is proving a game changer’. The next big step for the company is to fully utilise the ‘scheduling module’ of MIE Trak Pro to which David says ‘they cannot wait.‘
Bacon Engineering’s period of modernisation is realised with the incorporation of MIE Trak Pro into daily operations. With a whole host of modules for the company to grow into and with the continued support from the MIE team, the sky is the limit for this dynamic and progressive engineering business.
